The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Conclusion

At the beginning of this work we announced that the religion whose study we were taking up contained within it the most characteristic elements of the religious life. The exactness of this proposition may now be verified. Howsoever simple the system which we have studied may be, we have found within it all the great ideas and the principal ritual attitudes which are at the basis of even the most advanced religions: the division of things into sacred and profane, the notions of the soul, of spirits, of mythical personalities, and of a national and even international divinity, a negative cult with ascetic practices which are its exaggerated form, rites of oblation and communion, imitative rites, commemorative rites and expiatory rites; nothing essential is lacking. We are thus in a position to hope that the results at which we have arrived are not peculiar to totemism alone, but can aid us in an understanding of what religion in general is.

It may be objected that one single religion, whatever its field of extension may be, is too narrow a base for such an induction. We have not dreamed for a moment of ignoring the fact that an extended verification may add to the authority of a theory, but it is equally true that when a law has been proven by one well-made experiment, this proof is valid universally. If in one single case a scientist succeeded in finding out the secret of the life of even the most protoplasmic creature that can be imagined, the truths thus obtained would be applicable to all living beings, even the most advanced. Then if, in our studies of these very humble societies, we have really succeeded in discovering some of the elements out of which the most fundamental religious notions are made up, there is no reason for not extending the most general results of our researches to other religions. In fact, it is inconceivable that the same effect may be due now to one cause, now to another, according to the circumstances, unless the two causes are at bottom only one. A single idea cannot express one reality here and another one there, unless the duality is only apparent. If among certain peoples the ideas of sacredness, the soul and God are to be explained sociologically, it should be presumed scientifically that, in principle, the same explanation is valid for all the peoples among whom these same ideas are found with the same essential characteristics. Therefore, supposing that we have not been deceived, certain at least of our conclusions can be legitimately generalized. The moment has come to disengage these. And an induction of this sort, having at its foundation a clearly defined experiment, is less adventurous than many summary generalizations which, while attempting to reach the essence of religion at once, without resting upon the careful analysis of any religion in particular, greatly risk losing themselves in space.

I

The theorists who have undertaken to explain religion in rational terms have generally seen in it before all else a system of ideas, corresponding to some determined object. This object has been conceived in a multitude of ways: nature, the infinite, the unknowable, the ideal, etc.; but these differences matter but little. In any case, it was the conceptions and beliefs which were considered as the essential elements of religion. As for the rites, from this point of view they appear to be only an external translation, contingent and material, of these internal states which alone pass as having any intrinsic value. This conception is so commonly held that generally the disputes of which religion is the theme turn about the question whether it can conciliate itself with science or not, that is to say, whether or not there is a place beside our scientific knowledge for another form of thought which would be specifically religious.

But the believers, the men who lead the religious life and have a direct sensation of what it really is, object to this way of regarding it, saying that it does not correspond to their daily experience. In fact, they feel that the real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor to add to the conceptions which we owe to science others of another origin and another character, but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live. The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them. It is as though he were raised above the miseries of the world, because he is raised above his condition as a mere man; he believes that he is saved from evil, under whatever form he may conceive this evil. The first article in every creed is the belief in salvation by faith. But it is hard to see how a mere idea could have this efficacy. An idea is in reality only a part of ourselves; then how could it confer upon us powers superior to those which we have of our own nature? Howsoever rich it might be in affective virtues, it could add nothing to our natural vitality; for it could only release the motive powers which are within us, neither creating them nor increasing them. From the mere fact that we consider an object worthy of being loved and sought after, it does not follow that we feel ourselves stronger afterwards; it is also necessary that this object set free energies superior to these which we ordinarily have at our command and also that we have some means of making these enter into us and unite themselves to our interior lives. Now for that, it is not enough that we think of them; it is also indispensable that we place ourselves within their sphere of action, and that we set ourselves where we may best feel their influence; in a word, it is necessary that we act, and that we repeat the acts thus necessary every time we feel the need of renewing their effects. From this point of view, it is readily seen how that group of regularly repeated acts which form the cult get their importance. In fact, whoever has really practised a religion knows very well that it is the cult which gives rise to these impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of enthusiasm which are, for the believer, an experimental proof of his beliefs. The cult is not simply a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly translated; it is a collection of the means by which this is created and recreated periodically. Whether it consists in material acts or mental operations, it is always this which is efficacious.

Our entire study rests upon this postulate that the unanimous sentiment of the believers of all times cannot be purely illusory. Together with a recent apologist of the faith1301 we admit that these religious beliefs rest upon a specific experience whose demonstrative value is, in one sense, not one bit inferior to that of scientific experiments, though different from them. We, too, think that “a tree is known by its fruits,”1302 and that fertility is the best proof of what the roots are worth. But from the fact that a “religious experience,” if we choose to call it this, does exist and that it has a certain foundation—and, by the way, is there any experience which has none?—it does not follow that the reality which is its foundation conforms objectively to the idea which believers have of it. The very fact that the fashion in which it has been conceived has varied infinitely in different times is enough to prove that none of these conceptions express it adequately. If a scientist states it as an axiom that the sensations of heat and light which we feel correspond to some objective cause, he does not conclude that this is what it appears to the senses to be. Likewise, even if the impressions which the faithful feel are not imaginary, still they are in no way privileged intuitions; there is no reason for believing that they inform us better upon the nature of their object than do ordinary sensations upon the nature of bodies and their properties. In order to discover what this object consists of, we must submit them to an examination and elaboration analogous to that which has substituted for the sensuous idea of the world another which is scientific and conceptual.

This is precisely what we have tried to do, and we have seen that this reality, which mythologies have represented under so many different forms, but which is the universal and eternal objective cause of these sensations sui generis out of which religious experience is made, is society. We have shown what moral forces it develops and how it awakens this sentiment of a refuge, of a shield and of a guardian support which attaches the believer to his cult. It is that which raises him outside himself; it is even that which made him. For that which makes a man is the totality of the intellectual property which constitutes civilization, and civilization is the work of society. Thus is explained the preponderating rôle of the cult in all religions, whichever they may be. This is because society cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is not in action unless the individuals who compose it are assembled together and act in common. It is by common action that it takes consciousness of itself and realizes its position; it is before all else an active co-operation. The collective ideas and sentiments are even possible only owing to these exterior movements which symbolize them, as we have established.1303 Then it is action which dominates the religious life, because of the mere fact that it is society which is its source.

In addition to all the reasons which have been given to justify this conception, a final one may be added here, which is the result of our whole work. As we have progressed, we have established the fact that the fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, are of religious origin. We have seen that the same is true for magic and consequently for the different processes which have issued from it. On the other hand, it has long been known that up until a relatively advanced moment of evolution, moral and legal rules have been indistinguishable from ritual prescriptions. In summing up, then, it may be said that nearly all the great social institutions have been born in religion.1304 Now in order that these principal aspects of the collective life may have commenced by being only varied aspects of the religious life, it is obviously necessary that the religious life be the eminent form and, as it were, the concentrated expression of the whole collective life. If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.

Religious forces are therefore human forces, moral forces. It is true that since collective sentiments can become conscious of themselves only by fixing themselves upon external objects, they have not been able to take form without adopting some of their characteristics from other things: they have thus acquired a sort of physical nature; in this way they have come to mix themselves with the life of the material world, and then have considered themselves capable of explaining what passes there. But when they are considered only from this point of view and in this rôle, only their most superficial aspect is seen. In reality, the essential elements of which these collective sentiments are made have been borrowed by the understanding. It ordinarily seems that they should have a human character only when they are conceived under human forms;1305 but even the most impersonal and the most anonymous are nothing else than objectified sentiments.

It is only by regarding religion from this angle that it is possible to see its real significance. If we stick closely to appearances, rites often give the effect of purely manual operations: they are anointings, washings, meals. To consecrate something, it is put in contact with a source of religious energy, just as to-day a body is put in contact with a source of heat or electricity to warm or electrize it; the two processes employed are not essentially different. Thus understood, religious technique seems to be a sort of mystic mechanics. But these material manœuvres are only the external envelope under which the mental operations are hidden. Finally, there is no question of exercising a physical constraint upon blind and, incidentally, imaginary forces, but rather of reaching individual consciousnesses, of giving them a direction and of disciplining them. It is sometimes said that inferior religions are materialistic. Such an expression is inexact. All religions, even the crudest, are in a sense spiritualistic: for the powers they put in play are before all spiritual, and also their principal object is to act upon the moral life. Thus it is seen that whatever has been done in the name of religion cannot have been done in vain: for it is necessarily the society that did it, and it is humanity that has reaped the fruits.

But, it is said, what society is it that has thus made the basis of religion? Is it the real society, such as it is and acts before our very eyes, with the legal and moral organization which it has laboriously fashioned during the course of history? This is full of defects and imperfections. In it, evil goes beside the good, injustice often reigns supreme, and the truth is often obscured by error. How could anything so crudely organized inspire the sentiments of love, the ardent enthusiasm and the spirit of abnegation which all religions claim of their followers? These perfect beings which are gods could not have taken their traits from so mediocre, and sometimes even so base a reality.

But, on the other hand, does someone think of a perfect society, where justice and truth would be sovereign, and from which evil in all its forms would be banished for ever? No one would deny that this is in close relations with the religious sentiment; for, they would say, it is towards the realization of this that all religions strive. But that society is not an empirical fact, definite and observable; it is a fancy, a dream with which men have lightened their sufferings, but in which they have never really lived. It is merely an idea which comes to express our more or less obscure aspirations towards the good, the beautiful and the ideal. Now these aspirations have their roots in us; they come from the very depths of our being; then there is nothing outside of us which can account for them. Moreover, they are already religious in themselves; thus it would seem that the ideal society presupposes religion, far from being able to explain it.1306

But, in the first place, things are arbitrarily simplified when religion is seen only on its idealistic side: in its way, it is realistic. There is no physical or moral ugliness, there are no vices or evils which do not have a special divinity. There are gods of theft and trickery, of lust and war, of sickness and of death. Christianity itself, howsoever high the idea which it has made of the divinity may be, has been obliged to give the spirit of evil a place in its mythology. Satan is an essential piece of the Christian system; even if he is an impure being, he is not a profane one. The anti-god, is a god, inferior and subordinated, it is true, but nevertheless endowed with extended powers; he is even the object of rites, at least of negative ones. Thus religion, far from ignoring the real society and making abstraction of it, is in its image; it reflects all its aspects, even the most vulgar and the most repulsive. All is to be found there, and if in the majority of cases we see the good victorious over evil, life over death, the powers of light over the powers of darkness, it is because reality is not otherwise. If the relation between these two contrary forces were reversed, life would be impossible; but, as a matter of fact, it maintains itself and even tends to develop.

But if, in the midst of these mythologies and theologies we see reality clearly appearing, it is none the less true that it is found there only in an enlarged, transformed and idealized form. In this respect, the most primitive religions do not differ from the most recent and the most refined. For example, we have seen how the Arunta place at the beginning of time a mythical society whose organization exactly reproduces that which still exists to-day; it includes the same clans and phratries, it is under the same matrimonial rules and it practises the same rites. But the personages who compose it are ideal beings, gifted with powers and virtues to which common mortals cannot pretend. Their nature is not only higher, but it is different, since it is at once animal and human. The evil powers there undergo a similar metamorphosis: evil itself is, as it were, made sublime and idealized. The question now raises itself of whence this idealization comes.

Some reply that men have a natural faculty for idealizing, that is to say, of substituting for the real world another different one, to which they transport themselves by thought. But that is merely changing the terms of the problem; it is not resolving it or even advancing it. This systematic idealization is an essential characteristic of religions. Explaining them by an innate power of idealization is simply replacing one word by another which is the equivalent of the first; it is as if they said that men have made religions because they have a religious nature. Animals know only one world, the one which they perceive by experience, internal as well as external. Men alone have the faculty of conceiving the ideal, of adding something to the real. Now where does this singular privilege come from? Before making it an initial fact or a mysterious virtue which escapes science, we must be sure that it does not depend upon empirically determinable conditions.

The explanation of religion which we have proposed has precisely this advantage, that it gives an answer to this question. For our definition of the sacred is that it is something added to and above the real: now the ideal answers to this same definition; we cannot explain one without explaining the other. In fact, we have seen that if collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies are over-excited, passions more active, sensations stronger; there are even some which are produced only at this moment. A man does not recognize himself; he feels himself transformed and consequently he transforms the environment which surrounds him. In order to account for the very particular impressions which he receives, he attributes to the things with which he is in most direct contact properties which they have not, exceptional powers and virtues which the objects of every-day experience do not possess. In a word, above the real world where his profane life passes he has placed another which, in one sense, does not exist except in thought, but to which he attributes a higher sort of dignity than to the first. Thus, from a double point of view it is an ideal world.

The formation of the ideal world is therefore not an irreducible fact which escapes science; it depends upon conditions which observation can touch; it is a natural product of social life. For a society to become conscious of itself and maintain at the necessary degree of intensity the sentiments which it thus attains, it must assemble and concentrate itself. Now this concentration brings about an exaltation of the mental life which takes form in a group of ideal conceptions where is portrayed the new life thus awakened; they correspond to this new set of psychical forces which is added to those which we have at our disposition for the daily tasks of existence. A society can neither create itself nor recreate itself without at the same time creating an ideal. This creation is not a sort of work of supererogation for it, by which it would complete itself, being already formed; it is the act by which it is periodically made and remade. Therefore when some oppose the ideal society to the real society, like two antagonists which would lead us in opposite directions, they materialize and oppose abstractions. The ideal society is not outside of the real society; it is a part of it. Far from being divided between them as between two poles which mutually repel each other, we cannot hold to one without holding to the other. For a society is not made up merely of the mass of individuals who compose it, the ground which they occupy, the things which they use and the movements which they perform, but above all is the idea which it forms of itself. It is undoubtedly true that it hesitates over the manner in which it ought to conceive itself; it feels itself drawn in divergent directions. But these conflicts which break forth are not between the ideal and reality, but between two different ideals, that of yesterday and that of to-day, that which has the authority of tradition and that which has the hope of the future. There is surely a place for investigating whence these ideals evolve; but whatever solution may be given to this problem, it still remains that all passes in the world of the ideal.

Thus the collective ideal which religion expresses is far from being due to a vague innate power of the individual, but it is rather at the school of collective life that the individual has learned to idealize. It is in assimilating the ideals elaborated by society that he has become capable of conceiving the ideal. It is society which, by leading him within its sphere of action, has made him acquire the need of raising himself above the world of experience and has at the same time furnished him with the means of conceiving another. For society has constructed this new world in constructing itself, since it is society which this expresses. Thus both with the individual and in the group, the faculty of idealizing has nothing mysterious about it. It is not a sort of luxury which a man could get along without, but a condition of his very existence. He could not be a social being, that is to say, he could not be a man, if he had not acquired it. It is true that in incarnating themselves in individuals, collective ideals tend to individualize themselves. Each understands them after his own fashion and marks them with his own stamp; he suppresses certain elements and adds others. Thus the personal ideal disengages itself from the social ideal in proportion as the individual personality develops itself and becomes an autonomous source of action. But if we wish to understand this aptitude, so singular in appearance, of living outside of reality, it is enough to connect it with the social conditions upon which it depends.

Therefore it is necessary to avoid seeing in this theory of religion a simple restatement of historical materialism: that would be misunderstanding our thought to an extreme degree. In showing that religion is something essentially social, we do not mean to say that it confines itself to translating into another language the material forms of society and its immediate vital necessities. It is true that we take it as evident that social life depends upon its material foundation and bears its mark, just as the mental life of an individual depends upon his nervous system and in fact his whole organism. But collective consciousness is something more than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological basis, just as individual consciousness is something more than a simple efflorescence of the nervous system. In order that the former may appear, a synthesis sui generis of particular consciousnesses is required. Now this synthesis has the effect of disengaging a whole world of sentiments, ideas and images which, once born, obey laws all their own. They attract each other, repel each other, unite, divide themselves, and multiply, though these combinations are not commanded and necessitated by the condition of the underlying reality. The life thus brought into being even enjoys so great an independence that it sometimes indulges in manifestations with no purpose or utility of any sort, for the mere pleasure of affirming itself. We have shown that this is often precisely the case with ritual activity and mythological thought.1307

But if religion is the product of social causes, how can we explain the individual cult and the universalistic character of certain religions? If it is born in foro externo, how has it been able to pass into the inner conscience of the individual and penetrate there ever more and more profoundly? If it is the work of definite and individualized societies, how has it been able to detach itself from them, even to the point of being conceived as something common to all humanity?

In the course of our studies, we have met with the germs of individual religion and of religious cosmopolitanism, and we have seen how they were formed; thus we possess the more general elements of the reply which is to be given to this double question.

We have shown how the religious force which animates the clan particularizes itself, by incarnating itself in particular consciousnesses. Thus secondary sacred beings are formed; each individual has his own, made in his own image, associated to his own intimate life, bound up with his own destiny; it is the soul, the individual totem, the protecting ancestor, etc. These beings are the object of rites which the individual can celebrate by himself, outside of any group; this is the first form of the individual cult. To be sure, it is only a very rudimentary cult; but since the personality of the individual is still only slightly marked, and but little value is attributed to it, the cult which expresses it could hardly be expected to be very highly developed as yet. But as individuals have differentiated themselves more and more and the value of an individual has increased, the corresponding cult has taken a relatively greater place in the totality of the religious life and at the same time it is more fully closed to outside influences.

Thus the existence of individual cults implies nothing which contradicts or embarrasses the sociological interpretation of religion; for the religious forces to which it addresses itself are only the individualized forms of collective forces. Therefore, even when religion seems to be entirely within the individual conscience, it is still in society that it finds the living source from which it is nourished. We are now able to appreciate the value of the radical individualism which would make religion something purely individual: it misunderstands the fundamental conditions of the religious life. If up to the present it has remained in the stage of theoretical aspirations which have never been realized, it is because it is unrealizable. A philosophy may well be elaborated in the silence of the interior imagination, but not so a faith. For before all else, a faith is warmth, life, enthusiasm, the exaltation of the whole mental life, the raising of the individual above himself. Now how could he add to the energies which he possesses without going outside himself? How could he surpass himself merely by his own forces? The only source of life at which we can morally reanimate ourselves is that formed by the society of our fellow beings; the only moral forces with which we can sustain and increase our own are those which we get from others. Let us even admit that there really are beings more or less analogous to those which the mythologies represent. In order that they may exercise over souls the useful direction which is their reason for existence, it is necessary that men believe in them. Now these beliefs are active only when they are partaken by many. A man cannot retain them any length of time by a purely personal effort; it is not thus that they are born or that they are acquired; it is even doubtful if they can be kept under these conditions. In fact, a man who has a veritable faith feels an invincible need of spreading it: therefore he leaves his isolation, approaches others and seeks to convince them, and it is the ardour of the convictions which he arouses that strengthens his own. It would quickly weaken if it remained alone.

It is the same with religious universalism as with this individualism. Far from being an exclusive attribute of certain very great religions, we have found it, not at the base, it is true, but at the summit of the Australian system. Bunjil, Daramulun or Baiame are not simple tribal gods; each of them is recognized by a number of different tribes. In a sense, their cult is international. This conception is therefore very near to that found in the most recent theologies. So certain writers have felt it their duty to deny its authenticity, howsoever incontestable this may be.

And we have been able to show how this has been formed.

Neighbouring tribes of a similar civilization cannot fail to be in constant relations with each other. All sorts of circumstances give an occasion for it: besides commerce, which is still rudimentary, there are marriages; these international marriages are very common in Australia. In the course of these meetings, men naturally become conscious of the moral relationship which united them. They have the same social organization, the same division into phratries, clans and matrimonial classes; they practise the same rites of initiation, or wholly similar ones. Mutual loans and treaties result in reinforcing these spontaneous resemblances. The gods to which these manifestly identical institutions were attached could hardly have remained distinct in their minds. Everything tended to bring them together and consequently, even supposing that each tribe elaborated the notion independently, they must necessarily have tended to confound themselves with each other. Also, it is probable that it was in inter-tribal assemblies that they were first conceived. For they are chiefly the gods of initiation, and in the initiation ceremonies, the different tribes are usually represented. So if sacred beings are formed which are connected with no geographically determined society, that is not because they have an extra-social origin. It is because there are other groups above these geographically determined ones, whose contours are less clearly marked: they have no fixed frontiers, but include all sorts of more or less neighbouring and related tribes. The particular social life thus created tends to spread itself over an area with no definite limits. Naturally the mythological personages who correspond to it have the same character; their sphere of influence is not limited; they go beyond the particular tribes and their territory. They are the great international gods.

Now there is nothing in this situation which is peculiar to Australian societies. There is no people and no state which is not a part of another society, more or less unlimited, which embraces all the peoples and all the States with which the first comes in contact, either directly or indirectly; there is no national life which is not dominated by a collective life of an international nature. In proportion as we advance in history, these international groups acquire a greater importance and extent. Thus we see how, in certain cases, this universalistic tendency has been able to develop itself to the point of affecting not only the higher ideas of the religious system, but even the principles upon which it rests.

II

Thus there is something eternal in religion which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself. There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments; hence come ceremonies which do not differ from regular religious ceremonies, either in their object, the results which they produce, or the processes employed to attain these results. What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ, or of Jews remembering the exodus from Egypt or the promulgation of the decalogue, and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral or legal system or some great event in the national life?

If we find a little difficulty to-day in imagining what these feasts and ceremonies of the future could consist in, it is because we are going through a stage of transition and moral mediocrity. The great things of the past which filled our fathers with enthusiasm do not excite the same ardour in us, either because they have come into common usage to such an extent that we are unconscious of them, or else because they no longer answer to our actual aspirations; but as yet there is nothing to replace them. We can no longer impassionate ourselves for the principles in the name of which Christianity recommended to masters that they treat their slaves humanely, and, on the other hand, the idea which it has formed of human equality and fraternity seems to us to-day to leave too large a place for unjust inequalities. Its pity for the outcast seems to us too Platonic; we desire another which would be more practicable; but as yet we cannot clearly see what it should be nor how it could be realized in facts. In a word, the old gods are growing old or already dead, and others are not yet born. This is what rendered vain the attempt of Comte with the old historic souvenirs artificially revived; it is life itself, and not a dead past which can produce a living cult. But this state of incertitude and confused agitation cannot last for ever. A day will come when our societies will know again those hours of creative effervescence, in the course of which new ideas arise and new formulæ are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity; and when these hours shall have been passed through once, men will spontaneously feel the need of reliving them from time to time in thought, that is to say, of keeping alive their memory by means of celebrations which regularly reproduce their fruits. We have already seen how the French Revolution established a whole cycle of holidays to keep the principles with which it was inspired in a state of perpetual youth. If this institution quickly fell away, it was because the revolutionary faith lasted but a moment, and deceptions and discouragements rapidly succeeded the first moments of enthusiasm. But though the work may have miscarried, it enables us to imagine what might have happened in other conditions; and everything leads us to believe that it will be taken up again sooner or later. There are no gospels which are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones. As to the question of what symbols this new faith will express itself with, whether they will resemble those of the past or not, and whether or not they will be more adequate for the reality which they seek to translate, that is something which surpasses the human faculty of foresight and which does not appertain to the principal question.

But feasts and rites, in a word, the cult, are not the whole religion. This is not merely a system of practices, but also a system of ideas whose object is to explain the world; we have seen that even the humblest have their cosmology. Whatever connection there may be between these two elements of the religious life, they are still quite different. The one is turned towards action, which it demands and regulates; the other is turned towards thought, which it enriches and organizes. Then they do not depend upon the same conditions, and consequently it may be asked if the second answers to necessities as universal and as permanent as the first.

When specific characteristics are attributed to religious thought, and when it is believed that its function is to express, by means peculiar to itself, an aspect of reality which evades ordinary knowledge as well as science, one naturally refuses to admit that religion can ever abandon its speculative rôle. But our analysis of the facts does not seem to have shown this specific quality of religion. The religion which we have just studied is one of those whose symbols are the most disconcerting for the reason. There all appears mysterious. These beings which belong to the most heterogeneous groups at the same time, who multiply without ceasing to be one, who divide without diminishing, all seem, at first view, to belong to an entirely different world from the one where we live; some have even gone so far as to say that the mind which constructed them ignored the laws of logic completely. Perhaps the contrast between reason and faith has never been more thorough. Then if there has ever been a moment in history when their heterogeneousness should have stood out clearly, it is here. But contrary to all appearances, as we have pointed out, the realities to which religious speculation is then applied are the same as those which later serve as the subject of reflection for philosophers: they are nature, man, society. The mystery which appears to surround them is wholly superficial and disappears before a more painstaking observation: it is enough merely to set aside the veil with which mythological imagination has covered them for them to appear such as they really are. Religion sets itself to translate these realities into an intelligible language which does not differ in nature from that employed by science; the attempt is made by both to connect things with each other, to establish internal relations between them, to classify them and to systematize them. We have even seen that the essential ideas of scientific logic are of religious origin. It is true that in order to utilize them, science gives them a new elaboration; it purges them of all accidental elements; in a general way, it brings a spirit of criticism into all its doings, which religion ignores; it surrounds itself with precautions to “escape precipitation and bias,” and to hold aside the passions, prejudices and all subjective influences. But these perfectionings of method are not enough to differentiate it from religion. In this regard, both pursue the same end; scientific thought is only a more perfect form of religious thought. Thus it seems natural that the second should progressively retire before the first, as this becomes better fitted to perform the task.

And there is no doubt that this regression has taken place in the course of history. Having left religion, science tends to substitute itself for this latter in all that which concerns the cognitive and intellectual functions. Christianity has already definitely consecrated this substitution in the order of material things. Seeing in matter that which is profane before all else, it readily left the knowledge of this to another discipline, tradidit mundum hominum disputationi, “He gave the world over to the disputes of men”; it is thus that the natural sciences have been able to establish themselves and make their authority recognized without very great difficulty. But it could not give up the world of souls so easily; for it is before all over souls that the god of the Christians aspires to reign. That is why the idea of submitting the psychic life to science produced the effect of a sort of profanation for a long time; even to-day it is repugnant to many minds. However, experimental and comparative psychology is founded and to-day we must reckon with it. But the world of the religious and moral life is still forbidden. The great majority of men continue to believe that here there is an order of things which the mind cannot penetrate except by very special ways. Hence comes the active resistance which is met with every time that someone tries to treat religious and moral phenomena scientifically. But in spite of these oppositions, these attempts are constantly repeated and this persistence even allows us to foresee that this final barrier will finally give way and that science will establish herself as mistress even in this reserved region.

That is what the conflict between science and religion really amounts to. It is said that science denies religion in principle. But religion exists; it is a system of given facts; in a word, it is a reality. How could science deny this reality? Also, in so far as religion is action, and in so far as it is a means of making men live, science could not take its place, for even if this expresses life, it does not create it; it may well seek to explain the faith, but by that very act it presupposes it. Thus there is no conflict except upon one limited point. Of the two functions which religion originally fulfilled, there is one, and only one, which tends to escape it more and more: that is its speculative function. That which science refuses to grant to religion is not its right to exist, but its right to dogmatize upon the nature of things and the special competence which it claims for itself for knowing man and the world. As a matter of fact, it does not know itself. It does not even know what it is made of, nor to what need it answers. It is itself a subject for science, so far is it from being able to make the law for science! And from another point of view, since there is no proper subject for religious speculation outside that reality to which scientific reflection is applied, it is evident that this former cannot play the same rôle in the future that it has played in the past.

However, it seems destined to transform itself rather than to disappear.

We have said that there is something eternal in religion: it is the cult and the faith. Men cannot celebrate ceremonies for which they see no reason, nor can they accept a faith which they in no way understand. To spread itself or merely to maintain itself, it must be justified, that is to say, a theory must be made of it. A theory of this sort must undoubtedly be founded upon the different sciences, from the moment when these exist; first of all, upon the social sciences, for religious faith has its origin in society; then upon psychology, for society is a synthesis of human consciousnesses; and finally upon the sciences of nature, for man and society are a part of the universe and can be abstracted from it only artificially. But howsoever important these facts taken from the constituted sciences may be, they are not enough; for faith is before all else an impetus to action, while science, no matter how far it may be pushed, always remains at a distance from this. Science is fragmentary and incomplete; it advances but slowly and is never finished; but life cannot wait. The theories which are destined to make men live and act are therefore obliged to pass science and complete it prematurely. They are possible only when the practical exigencies and the vital necessities which we feel without distinctly conceiving them push thought in advance, beyond that which science permits us to affirm. Thus religions, even the most rational and laicized, cannot and never will be able to dispense with a particular form of speculation which, though having the same subjects as science itself, cannot be really scientific: the obscure intuitions of sensation and sentiment too often take the place of logical reasons. On one side, this speculation resembles that which we meet with in the religions of the past; but on another, it is different. While claiming and exercising the right of going beyond science, it must commence by knowing this and by inspiring itself with it. Ever since the authority of science was established, it must be reckoned with; one can go farther than it under the pressure of necessity, but he must take his direction from it. He can affirm nothing that it denies, deny nothing that it affirms, and establish nothing that is not directly or indirectly founded upon principles taken from it. From now on, the faith no longer exercises the same hegemony as formerly over the system of ideas that we may continue to call religion. A rival power rises up before it which, being born of it, ever after submits it to its criticism and control. And everything makes us foresee that this control will constantly become more extended and efficient, while no limit can be assigned to its future influence.

III

But if the fundamental notions of science are of a religious origin, how has religion been able to bring them forth? At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic. Or, since the reality which religious thought expresses is society, the question can be stated in the following terms, which make the entire difficulty appear even better: what has been able to make social life so important a source for the logical life? It seems as though nothing could have predestined it to this rôle, for it certainly was not to satisfy their speculative needs that men associated themselves together.

Perhaps we shall be found over bold in attempting so complex a question here. To treat it as it should be treated, the sociological conditions of knowledge should be known much better than they actually are; we are only beginning to catch glimpses of some of them. However, the question is so grave, and so directly implied in all that has preceded, that we must make an effort not to leave it without an answer. Perhaps it is not impossible, even at present, to state some general principles which may at least aid in the solution.

Logical thought is made up of concepts. Seeking how society can have played a rôle in the genesis of logical thought thus reduces itself to seeking how it can have taken a part in the formation of concepts.

If, as is ordinarily the case, we see in the concept only a general idea, the problem appears insoluble. By his own power, the individual can compare his conceptions and images, disengage that which they have in common, and thus, in a word, generalize. Then it is hard to see why this generalization should be possible only in and through society. But, in the first place, it is inadmissible that logical thought is characterized only by the greater extension of the conceptions of which it is made up. If particular ideas have nothing logical about them, why should it be different with general ones? The general exists only in the particular; it is the particular simplified and impoverished. Then the first could have no virtues or privileges which the second has not. Inversely, if conceptual thought can be applied to the class, species or variety, howsoever restricted these may be, why can it not be extended to the individual, that is to say, to the limit towards which the conception tends, proportionately as its extension diminishes? As a matter of fact, there are many concepts which have only individuals as their object. In every sort of religion, gods are individualities distinct from each other; however, they are conceived, not perceived. Each people represents its historic or legendary heroes in fashions which vary with the time. Finally, every one of us forms an idea of the individuals with whom he comes in contact, of their character, of their appearance, their distinctive traits and their moral and physical temperaments: these notions, too, are real concepts. It is true that in general they are formed crudely enough; but even among scientific concepts, are there a great many that are perfectly adequate for their object? In this direction, there are only differences of degree between them.

Therefore the concept must be defined by other characteristics. It is opposed to sensual representations of every order—sensations, perceptions or images—by the following properties.

Sensual representations are in a perpetual flux; they come after each other like the waves of a river, and even during the time that they last, they do not remain the same thing. Each of them is an integral part of the precise instant when it takes place. We are never sure of again finding a perception such as we experienced it the first time; for if the thing perceived has not changed, it is we who are no longer the same. On the contrary, the concept is, as it were, outside of time and change; it is in the depths below all this agitation; it might be said that it is in a different portion of the mind, which is serener and calmer. It does not move of itself, by an internal and spontaneous evolution, but, on the contrary, it resists change. It is a manner of thinking that, at every moment of time, is fixed and crystallized.1308 In so far as it is what it ought to be, it is immutable. If it changes, it is not because it is its nature to do so, but because we have discovered some imperfection in it; it is because it had to be rectified. The system of concepts with which we think in everyday life is that expressed by the vocabulary of our mother tongue; for every word translates a concept. Now language is something fixed; it changes but very slowly, and consequently it is the same with the conceptual system which it expresses. The scholar finds himself in the same situation in regard to the special terminology employed by the science to which he has consecrated himself, and hence in regard to the special scheme of concepts to which this terminology corresponds. It is true that he can make innovations, but these are always a sort of violence done to the established ways of thinking.

And at the same time that it is relatively immutable, the concept is universal, or at least capable of becoming so. A concept is not my concept; I hold it in common with other men, or, in any case, can communicate it to them. It is impossible for me to make a sensation pass from my consciousness into that of another; it holds closely to my organism and personality and cannot be detached from them. All that I can do is to invite others to place themselves before the same object as myself and to leave themselves to its action. On the other hand, conversation and all intellectual communication between men is an exchange of concepts. The concept is an essentially impersonal representation; it is through it that human intelligences communicate.1309

The nature of the concept, thus defined, bespeaks its origin. If it is common to all, it is the work of the community. Since it bears the mark of no particular mind, it is clear that it was elaborated by a unique intelligence, where all others meet each other, and after a fashion, come to nourish themselves. If it has more stability than sensations or images, it is because the collective representations are more stable than the individual ones; for while an individual is conscious even of the slight changes which take place in his environment, only events of a greater gravity can succeed in affecting the mental status of a society. Every time that we are in the presence of a type1310 of thought or action which is imposed uniformly upon particular wills or intelligences, this pressure exercised over the individual betrays the intervention of the group. Also, as we have already said, the concepts with which we ordinarily think are those of our vocabulary. Now it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations.

Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or less extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witnesses. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that they serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each?

This remark enables us to determine the sense in which we mean to say that concepts are collective representations. If they belong to a whole social group, it is not because they represent the average of the corresponding individual representations; for in that case they would be poorer than the latter in intellectual content, while, as a matter of fact, they contain much that surpasses the knowledge of the average individual. They are not abstractions which have a reality only in particular consciousnesses, but they are as concrete representations as an individual could form of his own personal environment: they correspond to the way in which this very special being, society, considers the things of its own proper experience. If, as a matter of fact, the concepts are nearly always general ideas, and if they express categories and classes rather than particular objects, it is because the unique and variable characteristics of things interest society but rarely; because of its very extent, it can scarcely be affected by more than their general and permanent qualities. Therefore it is to this aspect of affairs that it gives its attention: it is a part of its nature to see things in large and under the aspect which they ordinarily have. But this generality is not necessary for them, and, in any case, even when these representations have the generic character which they ordinarily have, they are the work of society and are enriched by its experience.

That is what makes conceptual thought so valuable for us. If concepts were only general ideas, they would not enrich knowledge a great deal, for, as we have already pointed out, the general contains nothing more than the particular. But if before all else they are collective representations, they add to that which we can learn by our own personal experience all that wisdom and science which the group has accumulated in the course of centuries. Thinking by concepts, is not merely seeing reality on its most general side, but it is projecting a light upon the sensation which illuminates it, penetrates it and transforms it. Conceiving something is both learning its essential elements better and also locating it in its place; for each civilization has its organized system of concepts which characterizes it. Before this scheme of ideas, the individual is in the same situation as the νοῦς of Plato before the world of Ideas. He must assimilate them to himself, for he must have them to hold intercourse with others; but the assimilation is always imperfect. Each of us sees them after his own fashion. There are some which escape us completely and remain outside of our circle of vision; there are others of which we perceive certain aspects only. There are even a great many which we pervert in holding, for as they are collective by nature, they cannot become individualized without being retouched, modified, and consequently falsified. Hence comes the great trouble we have in understanding each other, and the fact that we even lie to each other without wishing to: it is because we all use the same words without giving them the same meaning.

We are now able to see what the part of society in the genesis of logical thought is. This is possible only from the moment when, above the fugitive conceptions which they owe to sensuous experience, men have succeeded in conceiving a whole world of stable ideas, the common ground of all intelligences. In fact, logical thinking is always impersonal thinking, and is also thought sub species ætrnitatis—as though for all time. Impersonality and stability are the two characteristics of truth. Now logical life evidently presupposes that men know, at least confusedly, that there is such a thing as truth, distinct from sensuous appearances. But how have they been able to arrive at this conception? We generally talk as though it should have spontaneously presented itself to them from the moment they opened their eyes upon the world. However, there is nothing in immediate experience which could suggest it; everything even contradicts it. Thus the child and the animal have no suspicion of it. History shows that it has taken centuries for it to disengage and establish itself. In our Western world, it was with the great thinkers of Greece that it first became clearly conscious of itself and of the consequences which it implies; when the discovery was made, it caused an amazement which Plato has translated into magnificent language. But if it is only at this epoch that the idea is expressed in philosophic formulæ, it was necessarily pre-existent in the stage of an obscure sentiment. Philosophers have sought to elucidate this sentiment, but they have not succeeded. In order that they might reflect upon it and analyse it, it was necessary that it be given them, and that they seek to know whence it came, that is to say, in what experience it was founded. This is in collective experience. It is under the form of collective thought that impersonal thought is for the first time revealed to humanity; we cannot see by what other way this revelation could have been made. From the mere fact that society exists, there is also, outside of the individual sensations and images, a whole system of representations which enjoy marvellous properties. By means of them, men understand each other and intelligences grasp each other. They have within them a sort of force or moral ascendancy, in virtue of which they impose themselves upon individual minds. Hence the individual at least obscurely takes account of the fact that above his private ideas, there is a world of absolute ideas according to which he must shape his own; he catches a glimpse of a whole intellectual kingdom in which he participates, but which is greater than he. This is the first intuition of the realm of truth. From the moment when he first becomes conscious of these higher ideas, he sets himself to scrutinizing their nature; he asks whence these pre-eminent representations hold their prerogatives and, in so far as he believes that he has discovered their causes, he undertakes to put these causes into action for himself, in order that he may draw from them by his own force the effects which they produce; that is to say, he attributes to himself the right of making concepts. Thus the faculty of conception has individualized itself. But to understand its origins and function, it must be attached to the social conditions upon which it depends.

It may be objected that we show the concept in one of its aspects only, and that its unique rôle is not the assuring of a harmony among minds, but also, and to a greater extent, their harmony with the nature of things. It seems as though it had a reason for existence only on condition of being true, that is to say, objective, and as though its impersonality were only a consequence of its objectivity. It is in regard to things, thought of as adequately as possible, that minds ought to communicate. Nor do we deny that the evolution of concepts has been partially in this direction. The concept which was first held as true because it was collective tends to be no longer collective except on condition of being held as true: we demand its credentials of it before according it our confidence. But we must not lose sight of the fact that even to-day the great majority of the concepts which we use are not methodically constituted; we get them from language, that is to say, from common experience, without submitting them to any criticism. The scientifically elaborated and criticized concepts are always in the very slight minority. Also, between them and those which draw all their authority from the fact that they are collective, there are only differences of degree. A collective representation presents guarantees of objectivity by the fact that it is collective: for it is not without sufficient reason that it has been able to generalize and maintain itself with persistence. If it were out of accord with the nature of things, it would never have been able to acquire an extended and prolonged empire over intellects. At bottom, the confidence inspired by scientific concepts is due to the fact that they can be methodically controlled. But a collective representation is necessarily submitted to a control that is repeated indefinitely; the men who accept it verify it by their own experience. Therefore, it could not be wholly inadequate for its subject. It is true that it may express this by means of imperfect symbols; but scientific symbols themselves are never more than approximative. It is precisely this principle which is at the basis of the method which we follow in the study of religious phenomena: we take it as an axiom that religious beliefs, howsoever strange their appearance may be at times, contain a truth which must be discovered.1311

On the other hand, it is not at all true that concepts, even when constructed according to the rules of science, get their authority uniquely from their objective value. It is not enough that they be true to be believed. If they are not in harmony with the other beliefs and opinions, or, in a word, with the mass of the other collective representations, they will be denied; minds will be closed to them; consequently it will be as though they did not exist. To-day it is generally sufficient that they bear the stamp of science to receive a sort of privileged credit, because we have faith in science. But this faith does not differ essentially from religious faith. In the last resort, the value which we attribute to science depends upon the idea which we collectively form of its nature and rôle in life; that is as much as to say that it expresses a state of public opinion. In all social life, in fact, science rests upon opinion. It is undoubtedly true that this opinion can be taken as the object of a study and a science made of it; this is what sociology principally consists in. But the science of opinion does not make opinions; it can only observe them and make them more conscious of themselves. It is true that by this means it can lead them to change, but science continues to be dependent upon opinion at the very moment when it seems to be making its laws; for, as we have already shown, it is from opinion that it holds the force necessary to act upon opinion.1312

Saying that concepts express the manner in which society represents things is also saying that conceptual thought is coeval with humanity itself. We refuse to see in it the product of a more or less retarded culture. A man who did not think with concepts would not be a man, for he would not be a social being. If reduced to having only individual perceptions, he would be indistinguishable from the beasts. If it has been possible to sustain the contrary thesis, it is because concepts have been defined by characteristics which are not essential to them. They have been identified with general ideas1313 and with clearly limited and circumscribed general ideas.1314 In these conditions it has possibly seemed as though the inferior societies had no concepts properly so called; for they have only rudimentary processes of generalization and the ideas which they use are not generally very well defined. But the greater part of our concepts are equally indetermined; we force ourselves to define them only in discussions or when doing careful work. We have also seen that conceiving is not generalizing. Thinking conceptually is not simply isolating and grouping together the common characteristics of a certain number of objects; it is relating the variable to the permanent, the individual to the social. And since logical thought commences with the concept, it follows that it has always existed; there is no period in history when men have lived in a chronic confusion and contradiction. To be sure, we cannot insist too much upon the different characteristics which logic presents at different periods in history; it develops like the societies themselves. But howsoever real these differences may be, they should not cause us to neglect the similarities, which are no less essential.

IV

We are now in a position to take up a final question which has already been raised in our introduction1315 and which has been taken as understood in the remainder of this work. We have seen that at least some of the categories are social things. The question is where they got this character.

Undoubtedly it will be easily understood that since they are themselves concepts, they are the work of the group. It can even be said that there are no other concepts which present to an equal degree the signs by which a collective representation is recognized. In fact, their stability and impersonality are such that they have often passed as being absolutely universal and immutable. Also, as they express the fundamental conditions for an agreement between minds, it seems evident that they have been elaborated by society.

But the problem concerning them is more complex, for they are social in another sense and, as it were in the second degree. They not only come from society, but the things which they express are of a social nature. Not only is it society which has founded them, but their contents are the different aspects of the social being: the category of class was at first indistinct from the concept of the human group; it is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time; the territory occupied by the society furnished the material for the category of space; it is the collective force which was the prototype of the concept of efficient force, an essential element in the category of causality. However, the categories are not made to be applied only to the social realm; they reach out to all reality. Then how is it that they have taken from society the models upon which they have been constructed?

It is because they are the pre-eminent concepts, which have a preponderating part in our knowledge. In fact, the function of the categories is to dominate and envelop all the other concepts: they are permanent moulds for the mental life. Now for them to embrace such an object, they must be founded upon a reality of equal amplitude.

Undoubtedly the relations which they express exist in an implicit way in individual consciousnesses. The individual lives in time, and, as we have said, he has a certain sense of temporal orientation. He is situated at a determined point in space, and it has even been held, and sustained with good reasons, that all sensations have something special about them.1316 He has a feeling of resemblances; similar representations are brought together and the new representation formed by their union has a sort of generic character. We also have the sensation of a certain regularity in the order of the succession of phenomena; even an animal is not incapable of this. However, all these relations are strictly personal for the individual who recognizes them, and consequently the notion of them which he may have can in no case go beyond his own narrow horizon. The generic images which are formed in my consciousness by the fusion of similar images represent only the objects which I have perceived directly; there is nothing there which could give me the idea of a class, that is to say, of a mould including the whole group of all possible objects which satisfy the same condition. Also, it would be necessary to have the idea of group in the first place, and the mere observations of our interior life could never awaken that in us. But, above all, there is no individual experience, howsoever extended and prolonged it may be, which could give a suspicion of the existence of a whole class which would embrace every single being, and to which other classes are only co-ordinated or subordinated species. This idea of all, which is at the basis of the classifications which we have just cited, could not have come from the individual himself, who is only a part in relation to the whole and who never attains more than an infinitesimal fraction of reality. And yet there is perhaps no other category of greater importance; for as the rôle of the categories is to envelop all the other concepts, the category par excellence would seem to be this very concept of totality. The theorists of knowledge ordinarily postulate it as if it came of itself, while it really surpasses the contents of each individual consciousness taken alone to an infinite degree.

For the same reasons, the space which I know by my senses, of which I am the centre and where everything is disposed in relation to me, could not be space in general, which contains all extensions and where these are co-ordinated by personal guide-lines which are common to everybody. In the same way, the concrete duration which I feel passing within me and with me could not give me the idea of time in general: the first expresses only the rhythm of my individual life; the second should correspond to the rhythm of a life which is not that of any individual in particular, but in which all participate.1317 In the same way, finally, the regularities which I am able to conceive in the manner in which my sensations succeed one another may well have a value for me; they explain how it comes about that when I am given the first of two phenomena whose concurrence I have observed, I tend to expect the other. But this personal state of expectation could not be confounded with the conception of a universal order of succession which imposes itself upon all minds and all events.

Since the world expressed by the entire system of concepts is the one that society regards, society alone can furnish the most general notions with which it should be represented. Such an object can be embraced only by a subject which contains all the individual subjects within it. Since the universe does not exist except in so far as it is thought of, and since it is not completely thought of except by society, it takes a place in this latter; it becomes a part of society’s interior life, while this is the totality, outside of which nothing exists. The concept of totality is only the abstract form of the concept of society: it is the whole which includes all things, the supreme class which embraces all other classes. Such is the final principle upon which repose all these primitive classifications where beings from every realm are placed and classified in social forms, exactly like men.1318 But if the world is inside of society, the space which this latter occupies becomes confounded with space in general. In fact, we have seen how each thing has its assigned place in social space, and the degree to which this space in general differs from the concrete expanses which we perceive is well shown by the fact that this localization is wholly ideal and in no way resembles what it would have been if it had been dictated to us by sensuous experience alone.1319 For the same reason, the rhythm of collective life dominates and embraces the varied rhythms of all the elementary lives from which it results; consequently the time which it expresses dominates and embraces all particular durations. It is time in general. For a long time the history of the world has been only another aspect of the history of society. The one commences with the other; the periods of the first are determined by the periods of the second. This impersonal and total duration is measured, and the guide-lines in relation to which it is divided and organized are fixed by the movements of concentration or dispersion of society; or, more generally, the periodical necessities for a collective renewal. If these critical instants are generally attached to some material phenomenon, such as the regular recurrence of such or such a star or the alternation of the seasons, it is because objective signs are necessary to make this essentially social organization intelligible to all. In the same way, finally, the causal relation, from the moment when it is collectively stated by the group, becomes independent of every individual consciousness; it rises above all particular minds and events. It is a law whose value depends upon no person. We have already shown how it is clearly thus that it seems to have originated.

Another reason explains why the constituent elements of the categories should have been taken from social life: it is because the relations which they express could not have been learned except in and through society. If they are in a sense immanent in the life of an individual, he has neither a reason nor the means for learning them, reflecting upon them and forming them into distinct ideas. In order to orient himself personally in space and to know at what moments he should satisfy his various organic needs, he has no need of making, once and for all, a conceptual representation of time and space. Many animals are able to find the road which leads to places with which they are familiar; they come back at a proper moment without knowing any of the categories; sensations are enough to direct them automatically. They would also be enough for men, if their sensations had to satisfy only individual needs. To recognize the fact that one thing resembles another which we have already experienced, it is in no way necessary that we arrange them all in groups and species: the way in which similar images call up each other and unite is enough to give the feeling of resemblance. The impression that a certain thing has already been seen or experienced implies no classification. To recognize the things which we should seek or from which we should flee, it would not be necessary to attach the effects of the two to their causes by a logical bond, if individual conveniences were the only ones in question. Purely empirical sequences and strong connections between the concrete representations would be as sure guides for the will. Not only is it true that the animal has no others, but also our own personal conduct frequently supposes nothing more. The prudent man is the one who has a very clear sensation of what must be done, but which he would ordinarily be quite incapable of stating as a general law.

It is a different matter with society. This is possible only when the individuals and things which compose it are divided into certain groups, that is to say, classified, and when these groups are classified in relation to each other. Society supposes a self-conscious organization which is nothing other than a classification. This organization of society naturally extends itself to the place which this occupies. To avoid all collisions, it is necessary that each particular group have a determined portion of space assigned to it: in other terms, it is necessary that space in general be divided, differentiated, arranged, and that these divisions and arrangements be known to everybody. On the other hand, every summons to a celebration, a hunt or a military expedition implies fixed and established dates, and consequently that a common time is agreed upon, which everybody conceives in the same fashion. Finally, the co-operation of many persons with the same end in view is possible only when they are in agreement as to the relation which exists between this end and the means of attaining it, that is to say, when the same causal relation is admitted by all the co-operators in the enterprise. It is not surprising, therefore, that social time, social space, social classes and causality should be the basis of the corresponding categories, since it is under their social forms that these different relations were first grasped with a certain clarity by the human intellect.

In summing up, then, we must say that society is not at all the illogical or a-logical, incoherent and fantastic being which it has too often been considered. Quite on the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses. Being placed outside of and above individual and local contingencies, it sees things only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas. At the same time that it sees from above, it sees farther; at every moment of time, it embraces all known reality; that is why it alone can furnish the mind with the moulds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them. It does not create these moulds artificially; it finds them within itself; it does nothing but become conscious of them. They translate the ways of being which are found in all the stages of reality but which appear in their full clarity only at the summit, because the extreme complexity of the psychic life which passes there necessitates a greater development of consciousness. Attributing social origins to logical thought is not debasing it or diminishing its value or reducing it to nothing more than a system of artificial combinations; on the contrary, it is relating it to a cause which implies it naturally. But this is not saying that the ideas elaborated in this way are at once adequate for their object. If society is something universal in relation to the individual, it is none the less an individuality itself, which has its own personal physiognomy and its idiosyncrasies; it is a particular subject and consequently particularizes whatever it thinks of. Therefore collective representations also contain subjective elements, and these must be progressively rooted out, if we are to approach reality more closely. But howsoever crude these may have been at the beginning, the fact remains that with them the germ of a new mentality was given, to which the individual could never have raised himself by his own efforts: by them the way was opened to a stable, impersonal and organized thought which then had nothing to do except to develop its nature.

Also, the causes which have determined this development do not seem to be specifically different from those which gave it its initial impulse. If logical thought tends to rid itself more and more of the subjective and personal elements which it still retains from its origin, it is not because extra-social factors have intervened; it is much rather because a social life of a new sort is developing. It is this international life which has already resulted in universalizing religious beliefs. As it extends, the collective horizon enlarges; the society ceases to appear as the only whole, to become a part of a much vaster one, with indetermined frontiers, which is susceptible of advancing indefinitely. Consequently things can no longer be contained in the social moulds according to which they were primitively classified; they must be organized according to principles which are their own, so logical organization differentiates itself from the social organization and becomes autonomous. Really and truly human thought is not a primitive fact; it is the product of history; it is the ideal limit towards which we are constantly approaching, but which in all probability we shall never succeed in reaching.

Thus it is not at all true that between science on the one hand, and morals and religion on the other, there exists that sort of antinomy which has so frequently been admitted, for the two forms of human activity really come from one and the same source. Kant understood this very well, and therefore he made the speculative reason and the practical reason two different aspects of the same faculty. According to him, what makes their unity is the fact that the two are directed towards the universal. Rational thinking is thinking according to the laws which are imposed upon all reasonable beings; acting morally is conducting one’s self according to those maxims which can be extended without contradiction to all wills. In other words, science and morals imply that the individual is capable of raising himself above his own peculiar point of view and of living an impersonal life. In fact, it cannot be doubted that this is a trait common to all the higher forms of thought and action. What Kant’s system does not explain, however, is the origin of this sort of contradiction which is realized in man. Why is he forced to do violence to himself by leaving his individuality, and, inversely, why is the impersonal law obliged to be dissipated by incarnating itself in individuals? Is it answered that there are two antagonistic worlds in which we participate equally, the world of matter and sense on the one hand, and the world of pure and impersonal reason on the other? That is merely repeating the question in slightly different terms, for what we are trying to find out is why we must lead these two existences at the same time. Why do these two worlds, which seem to contradict each other, not remain outside of each other, and why must they mutually penetrate one another in spite of their antagonism? The only explanation which has ever been given of this singular necessity is the hypothesis of the Fall, with all the difficulties which it implies, and which need not be repeated here. On the other hand, all mystery disappears the moment that it is recognized that impersonal reason is only another name given to collective thought. For this is possible only through a group of individuals; it supposes them, and in their turn, they suppose it, for they can continue to exist only by grouping themselves together. The kingdom of ends and impersonal truths can realize itself only by the co-operation of particular wills, and the reasons for which these participate in it are the same as those for which they co-operate. In a word, there is something impersonal in us because there is something social in all of us, and since social life embraces at once both representations and practices, this impersonality naturally extends to ideas as well as to acts.

Perhaps some will be surprised to see us connect the most elevated forms of thought with society: the cause appears quite humble, in consideration of the value which we attribute to the effect. Between the world of the senses and appetites on the one hand, and that of reason and morals on the other, the distance is so considerable that the second would seem to have been able to add itself to the first only by a creative act. But attributing to society this preponderating rôle in the genesis of our nature is not denying this creation; for society has a creative power which no other observable being can equal. In fact, all creation, if not a mystical operation which escapes science and knowledge, is the product of a synthesis. Now if the synthesis of particular conceptions which take place in each individual consciousness are already and of themselves productive of novelties, how much more efficacious these vast syntheses of complete consciousnesses which make society must be! A society is the most powerful combination of physical and moral forces of which nature offers us an example. Nowhere else is an equal richness of different materials, carried to such a degree of concentration, to be found. Then it is not surprising that a higher life disengages itself which, by reacting upon the elements of which it is the product, raises them to a higher plane of existence and transforms them.

Thus sociology appears destined to open a new way to the science of man. Up to the present, thinkers were placed before this double alternative: either explain the superior and specific faculties of men by connecting them to the inferior forms of his being, the reason to the senses, or the mind to matter, which is equivalent to denying their uniqueness; or else attach them to some super-experimental reality which was postulated, but whose existence could be established by no observation. What put them in this difficulty was the fact that the individual passed as being the finis naturæ—the ultimate creation of nature; it seemed that there was nothing beyond him, or at least nothing that science could touch. But from the moment when it is recognized that above the individual there is society, and that this is not a nominal being created by reason, but a system of active forces, a new manner of explaining men becomes possible. To conserve his distinctive traits it is no longer necessary to put them outside experience. At least, before going to this last extremity, it would be well to see if that which surpasses the individual, though it is within him, does not come from this super-individual reality which we experience in society. To be sure, it cannot be said at present to what point these explanations may be able to reach, and whether or not they are of a nature to resolve all the problems. But it is equally impossible to mark in advance a limit beyond which they cannot go. What must be done is to try the hypothesis and submit it as methodically as possible to the control of facts. This is what we have tried to do.

Footnotes

1 In the same way, we shall say of these societies that they are primitive, and we shall call the men of these societies primitives. Undoubtedly the expression lacks precision, but that is hardly evitable, and besides, when we have taken pains to fix the meaning, it is not inconvenient.

2 But that is not equivalent to saying that all luxury is lacking to the primitive cults. On the contrary, we shall see that in every religion there are beliefs and practices which do not aim at strictly utilitarian ends (Bk. III, ch. iv, § 2). This luxury is indispensable to the religious life; it is at its very heart. But it is much more rudimentary in the inferior religions than in the others, so we are better able to determine its reason for existence here.

3 It is seen that we give a wholly relative sense to this word “origins,” just as to the word “primitive.” By it we do not mean an absolute beginning, but the most simple social condition that is actually known or that beyond which we cannot go at present. When we speak of the origins or of the commencement of religious history or thought, it is in this sense that our statements should be understood.

4 We say that time and space are categories because there is no difference between the rôle played by these ideas in the intellectual life and that which falls to the ideas of class or cause (on this point see, Hamelin, Essai sur les éléments principaux de la représentation, pp. 63, 76).

5 See the support given this assertion in Hubert and Mauss, Mélanges d’Histoire des Religions (Travaux de l’Année Sociologique), chapter on La Représentation du Temps dans la Religion.

6 Thus we see all the difference which exists between the group of sensations and images which serve to locate us in time, and the category of time. The first are the summary of individual experiences, which are of value only for the person who experienced them. But what the category of time expresses is a time common to the group, a social time, so to speak. In itself it is a veritable social institution. Also, it is peculiar to man; animals have no representations of this sort.
This distinction between the category of time and the corresponding sensations could be made equally well in regard to space or cause. Perhaps this would aid in clearing up certain confusions which are maintained by the controversies of which these questions are the subject. We shall return to this point in the conclusion of the present work (§ 4).

7 Op. cit., pp. 75 ff.

8 Or else it would be necessary to admit that all individuals, in virtue of their organo-physical constitution, are spontaneously affected in the same manner by the different parts of space: which is more improbable, especially as in themselves the different regions are sympathetically indifferent. Also, the divisions of space vary with different societies, which is a proof that they are not founded exclusively upon the congenital nature of man.

9 See Durkheim and Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, in Année Sociologique, VI, pp. 47 ff.

10 See Durkheim and Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, in Année Sociologique, VI, p. 34.

11 Zuñi Creation Myths, in 13th Rep. of the Bureau of Amer. Ethnol., pp. 367 ff.

12 See Hertz, La prééminence de la main droite. Etude de polarité religieuse, in the Revue Philosophique, Dec., 1909. On this same question of the relations between the representation of space and the form of the group, see the chapter in Ratzel, Politische Geographie, entitled Der Raum in Geist der Völker.

13 We do not mean to say that mythological thought ignores it, but that it contradicts it more frequently and openly than scientific thought does. Inversely, we shall show that science cannot escape violating it, though it holds to it far more scrupulously than religion does. On this subject, as on many others, there are only differences of degree between science and religion; but if these differences should not be exaggerated, they must be noted, for they are significant.

14 This hypothesis has already been set forth by the founders of the Völkerpsychologie. It is especially remarked in a short article by Windelbrand entitled Die Erkenntnisslehre unter dem Völkerpsychologischen Gesichtspunke, in the Zeitsch. f. Völkerpsychologie, viii, pp. 166 ff. Cf. a note of Steinthal on the same subject, ibid., pp. 178 ff.

15 Even in the theory of Spencer, it is by individual experience that the categories are made. The only difference which there is in this regard between ordinary empiricism and evolutionary empiricism is that according to this latter, the results of individual experience are accumulated by heredity. But this accumulation adds nothing essential to them; no element enters into their composition which does not have its origin in the experience of the individual. According to this theory, also, the necessity with which the categories actually impose themselves upon us is the product of an illusion and a superstitious prejudice, strongly rooted in the organism, to be sure, but without foundation in the nature of things.

16 Perhaps some will be surprised that we do not define the apriorist theory by the hypothesis of innateness. But this conception really plays a secondary part in the doctrine. It is a simple way of stating the impossibility of reducing rational knowledge to empirical data. Saying that the former is innate is only a positive way of saying that it is not the product of experience, such as it is ordinarily conceived.

17 At least, in so far as there are any representations which are individual and hence wholly empirical. But there are in fact probably none where the two elements are not found closely united.

18 This irreducibility must not be taken in any absolute sense. We do not wish to say that there is nothing in the empirical representations which shows rational ones, nor that there is nothing in the individual which could be taken as a sign of social life. If experience were completely separated from all that is rational, reason could not operate upon it; in the same way, if the psychic nature of the individual were absolutely opposed to the social life, society would be impossible. A complete analysis of the categories should seek these germs of rationality even in the individual consciousness. We shall have occasion to come back to this point in our conclusion. All that we wish to establish here is that between these indistinct germs of reason and the reason properly so called, there is a difference comparable to that which separates the properties of the mineral elements out of which a living being is composed from the characteristic attributes of life after this has once been constituted.

19 It has frequently been remarked that social disturbances result in multiplying mental disturbances. This is one more proof that logical discipline is a special aspect of social discipline. The first gives way as the second is weakened.

20 There is an analogy between this logical necessity and moral obligation but there is not an actual identity. To-day society treats criminals in a different fashion than subjects whose intelligence only is abnormal; that is a proof that the authority attached to logical rules and that inherent in moral rules are not of the same nature, in spite of certain similarities. They are two species of the same class. It would be interesting to make a study on the nature and origin of this difference, which is probably not primitive, for during a long time, the public conscience has poorly distinguished between the deranged and the delinquent. We confine ourselves to signalizing this question. By this example, one may see the number of problems which are raised by the analysis of these notions which generally pass as being elementary and simple, but which are really of an extreme complexity.

21 This question will be treated again in the conclusion of this work.

22 The rationalism which is imminent in the sociological theory of knowledge is thus midway between the classical empiricism and apriorism. For the first, the categories are purely artificial constructions; for the second, on the contrary, they are given by nature; for us, they are in a sense a work of art, but of an art which imitates nature with a perfection capable of increasing unlimitedly.

23 For example, that which is at the foundation of the category of time is the rhythm of social life; but if there is a rhythm in collective life, one may rest assured that there is another in the life of the individual, and more generally, in that of the universe. The first is merely more marked and apparent than the others. In the same way, we shall see that the notion of class is founded on that of the human group. But if men form natural groups, it can be assumed that among things there exists groups which are at once analogous and different. Classes and species are natural groups of things.
If it seems to many minds that a social origin cannot be attributed to the categories without depriving them of all speculative value, it is because society is still too frequently regarded as something that is not natural; hence it is concluded that the representations which express it express nothing in nature. But the conclusion is not worth more than the premise.

24 This is how it is legitimate to compare the categories to tools; for on its side, a tool is material accumulated capital. There is a close relationship between the three ideas of tool, category and institution.

25 We have already attempted to define religious phenomena in a paper which was published in the Année Sociologique (Vol. II, pp. 1 ff.). The definition then given differs, as will be seen, from the one we give to-day. At the end of this chapter (p. 47, n. 1), we shall explain the reasons which have led us to these modifications, but which imply no essential change in the conception of the facts.

26 See above, p. 3. We shall say nothing more upon the necessity of these preliminary definitions nor upon the method to be followed to attain them. That is exposed in our Règles de la Méthode sociologique, pp. 43 ff. Cf. Le Suicide, pp. 1 ff. (Paris, F. Alcan).

27 First Principles, p. 37.

28 Introduction to the Science of Religions, p. 18. Cf. Origin and Development of Religion, p. 23.

29 This same frame of mind is also found in the scholastic period, as is witnessed by the formula with which philosophy was defined at this time: Fides quærens intellectum.

30 Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 15 ff.

31 Introduction to the History of Religions, p. 23.

32 See below, Bk. III, ch. ii.

33 Prolegomena to the History of Religions, p. 25 (tr. by Squire).

34 Primitive Culture, I, p. 424. (Fourth edition, 1903.)

35 Beginning with the first edition of the Golden Bough, I, pp. 30-32.

36 Notably Spencer and Gillen and even Preuss, who gives the name magic to all non-individualized religious forces.

37 Burnouf, Introduction à l’histoire du bouddhisme indien, sec. edit., p. 464. The last word of the text shows that Buddhism does not even admit the existence of an eternal Nature.

38 Barth, The Religions of India, p. 110 (tr. by Wood).

39 Oldenberg, Buddha, p. 53 (tr. by Hoey).

40 Oldenberg, ibid., pp. 313 ff. Cf. Kern, Histoire du bouddhisme dans l’Inde, I, pp. 389 ff.

41 Oldenberg, p. 250; Barth, p. 110.

42 Oldenberg, p. 314.

43 Barth, p. 109. In the same way, Burnouf says, “I have the profound conviction that if Çâkya had not found about him a Pantheon already peopled with the gods just named, he would have felt no need of inventing them” (Introd. à l’hist. du bouddhisme indien, p. 119).

44 Burnouf, op. cit., p. 117.

45 Kern, op. cit., I, p. 289.

46 “The belief, universally admitted in India, that great holiness is necessarily accompanied by supernatural faculties, is the only support which he (Çâkya) should find in spirits” (Burnouf, p. 119).

47 Burnouf, p. 120.

48 Ibid., p. 107.

49 Ibid., p. 302.

50 This is what Kern expresses in the following terms: “In certain regards, he is a man; in certain others, he is not a man; in others, he is neither the one nor the other” (op. cit., I, p. 290).

51 “The conception” “was foreign to Buddhism” “that the divine Head of the Community is not absent from his people, but that he dwells powerfully in their midst as their lord and king, so that all cultus is nothing else but the expression of this continuing living fellowship. Buddha has entered into Nirvâna; if his believers desired to invoke him, he could not hear them” (Oldenberg, p. 369).

52 “Buddhist doctrine might be in all its essentials what it actually is, even if the idea of Buddha remained completely foreign to it” (Oldenberg, p. 322).—And whatever is said of the historic Buddha can be applied equally well to the mythological Buddhas.

53 For the same idea, see Max Müller, Natural Religion, pp. 103 ff. and 190.

54 Op. cit., p. 146.

55 Barth, in Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses, VI, p. 548.

56 Oldenberg, op. cit., p. 53.

57 1 Sam. xxi., 6.

58 Levit. xii.

59 Deut. xxii., 10 and 11.

60 La religion védique, I, p. 122.

61 Ibid., p. 133.

62 “No text,” says Bergaigne, “bears better witness to the consciousness of a magic action by man upon the waters of heaven than verse x, 32, 7, where this belief is expressed in general terms, applicable to an actual man, as well as to his real or mythological ancestors: ‘The ignorant man has questioned the wise; instructed by the wise, he acts, and here is the profit of his instruction: he obtains the flowing of streams’” (p. 137).

63 Ibid., p. 139.

64 Examples will also be found in Hubert, art. Magia in the Dictionnaire des Antiquités, VI, p. 1509.

65 Not to mention the sage and the saint who practise these truths and who for that reason are sacred.

66 This is not saying that these relations cannot take a religious character. But they do not do so necessarily.

67 Schultze, Fetichismus, p. 129.

68 Examples of these usages will be found in Frazer, Golden Bough, 2 edit., I, pp. 81 ff.

69 The conception according to which the profane is opposed to the sacred, just as the irrational is to the rational, or the intelligible is to the mysterious, is only one of the forms under which this opposition is expressed. Science being once constituted, it has taken a profane character, especially in the eyes of the Christian religions; from that it appears as though it could not be applied to sacred things.

70 See Frazer, On Some Ceremonies of the Central Australian Tribes in Australian Association for the Advancement of Science, 1901, pp. 313 ff. This conception is also of an extreme generality. In India, the simple participation in the sacrificial act has the same effects; the sacrificer, by the mere act of entering within the circle of sacred things, changes his personality. (See, Hubert and Mauss, Essai sur le Sacrifice in the Année Sociologique, II, p. 101.)

71 See what was said of the initiation above, p. 39.

72 We shall point out below how, for example, certain species of sacred things exist, between which there is an incompatibility as all-exclusive as that between the sacred and the profane (Bk. III, ch. v, § 4).

73 This is the case with certain marriage and funeral rites, for example.

74 See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 534 ff.; Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 463; Howitt, Native Tribes of S.E. Australia, pp. 359-361.

75 See Codrington, The Melanesians, ch. xii.

76 See Hubert, art. Magia in Dictionnaire des Antiquités.

77 For example, in Melanesia, the tindalo is a spirit, now religious, now magic (Codrington, pp. 125 ff., 194 ff.).

78 See Hubert and Mauss, Théorie Générale de la Magie, in Année Sociologique, vol. VII, pp. 83-84.

79 For example, the host is profaned in the black mass.

80 One turns his back to the altar, or goes around the altar commencing by the left instead of by the right.

81 Loc. cit., p. 19.

82 Undoubtedly it is rare that a ceremony does not have some director at the moment when it is celebrated; even in the most crudely organized societies, there are generally certain men whom the importance of their social position points out to exercise a directing influence over the religious life (for example, the chiefs of the local groups of certain Australian societies). But this attribution of functions is still very uncertain.

83 At Athens, the gods to whom the domestic cult was addressed were only specialized forms of the gods of the city (Ζεύς κτήσιος, Ζεύς ἑρκεῖος). In the same way, in the Middle Ages, the patrons of the guilds were saints of the calendar.

84 For the name Church is ordinarily applied only to a group whose common beliefs refer to a circle of more special affairs.

85 Hubert and Mauss, loc. cit., p. 18.

86 Robertson Smith has already pointed out that magic is opposed to religion, as the individual to the social (The Religion of the Semites, 2 edit., pp. 264-265). Also, in thus distinguishing magic from religion, we do not mean to establish a break of continuity between them. The frontiers between the two domains are frequently uncertain.

87 Codrington, Trans. and Proc. Roy. Soc. of Victoria, XVI, p. 136.

88 Negrioli, Dei Genii presso i Romani.

89 This is the conclusion reached by Spencer in his Ecclesiastical Institutions (ch. xvi), and by Sabatier in his Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, based on Psychology and History (tr. by Seed), and by all the school to which he belongs.

90 Notably among numerous Indian tribes of North America.

91 This statement of fact does not touch the question whether exterior and public religion is not merely the development of an interior and personal religion which was the primitive fact, or whether, on the contrary, the second is not the projection of the first into individual consciences. The problem will be directly attacked below (Bk. II, ch. v, § 2, cf. the same book, ch. vi and vii, § 1). For the moment, we confine ourselves to remarking that the individual cult is presented to the observer as an element of, and something dependent upon, the collective cult.

92 It is by this that our present definition is connected to the one we have already proposed in the Année Sociologique. In this other work, we defined religious beliefs exclusively by their obligatory character; but, as we shall show, this obligation evidently comes from the fact that these beliefs are the possession of a group which imposes them upon its members. The two definitions are thus in a large part the same. If we have thought it best to propose a new one, it is because the first was too formal, and neglected the contents of the religious representations too much. It will be seen, in the discussions which follow, how important it is to put this characteristic into evidence at once. Moreover, if their imperative character is really a distinctive trait of religious beliefs, it allows of an infinite number of degrees; consequently there are even cases where it is not easily perceptible. Hence come difficulties and embarrassments which are avoided by substituting for this criterium the one we now employ.

93 We thus leave aside here those theories which, in whole or in part, make use of super-experimental data. This is the case with the theory which Andrew Lang exposed in his book, The Making of Religion, and which Father Schmidt has taken up again, with variations of detail, in a series of articles on The Origin of the Idea of God (Anthropos, 1908, 1909). Lang does not set animism definitely aside, but in the last analysis, he admits a sense or intuition of the divine directly. Also, if we do not consider it necessary to expose and discuss this conception in the present chapter, we do not intend to pass it over in silence; we shall come to it again below, when we shall ourselves explain the facts upon which it is founded (Bk. II, ch. ix, § 4).

94 This is the case, for example, of Fustel de Coulanges who accepts the two conceptions together (The Ancient City, Bk. I and Bk. III, ch. ii).

95 This is the case with Jevons, who criticizes the animism taught by Tylor, but accepts his theories on the origin of the idea of the soul and the anthropomorphic instinct of man. Inversely, Usener, in his Götternamen, rejects certain hypotheses of Max Müller which will be described below, but admits the principal postulates of naturism.

96 Primitive Culture, chs. xi-xviii.

97 Principles of Sociology, Parts I and VI.

98 This is the word used by Tylor. It has the inconvenience of seeming to imply that men, in the proper sense of the term, existed before there was a civilization. However, there is no proper term for expressing the idea; that of primitive, which we prefer to use, lacking a better, is, as we have said, far from satisfactory.

99 Tylor, op. cit., I, pp. 455 f.

100 See Spencer, Principles of Sociology, I, pp. 143 ff., and Tylor, op. cit., I, pp. 434 ff., 445 ff.

101 Tylor, II, pp. 113 ff.

102 Tylor, I, pp. 481 ff.

103 Principles of Sociology, I, p. 126.

104 Ibid., pp. 322 ff.

105 Ibid., pp. 366-367.

106 Ibid., p. 346. Cf. p. 384.

107 See below, Bk. II, ch. viii.

108 See Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 123-127; Strehlow, Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral Australien, II, pp. 52 ff.

109 The Melanesians, pp. 249-250.

110 Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-Eastern Australia, p. 358.

111 Ibid., pp. 434-442.

112 Of the negroes of southern Guinea, Tylor says that “their sleeping hours are characterized by almost as much intercourse with the dead as their waking are with the living” (Primitive Culture, I, p. 443). In regard to these peoples, the same author cites this remark of an observer: “All their dreams are construed into visits from the spirits of their deceased friends” (ibid., p. 443). This statement is certainly exaggerated; but it is one more proof of the frequency of mystic dreams among the primitives. The etymology which Strehlow proposes for the Arunta word altjirerama, which means “to dream,” also tends to confirm this theory. This word is composed of altjira, which Strehlow translates by “god” and rama, which means “see.” Thus a dream would be the moment when a man is in relations with sacred beings (Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme, I, p. 2).

113 Andrew Lang, who also refuses to admit that the idea of the soul was suggested to men by their dream experiences, believes that he can derive it from other empirical data: these are the data of spiritualism (telepathy, distance-seeing, etc.). We do not consider it necessary to discuss the theory such as it has been exposed in his book The Making of Religion. It reposes upon the hypothesis that spiritualism is a fact of constant observation, and that distance-seeing is a real faculty of men, or at least of certain men, but it is well known how much this theory is scientifically contested. What is still more contestable is that the facts of spiritualism are apparent enough and of a sufficient frequency to have been able to serve as the basis for all the religious beliefs and practices which are connected with souls and spirits. The examination of these questions would carry us too far from what is the object of our study. It is still less necessary to engage ourselves in this examination, since the theory of Lang remains open to many of the objections which we shall address to that of Tylor in the paragraphs which follow.

114 Jevons has made a similar remark. With Tylor, he admits that the idea of the soul comes from dreams, and that after it was created, men projected it into things. But, he adds, the fact that nature has been conceived as animated like men does not explain how it became the object of a cult. “The man who believes the bowing tree or the leaping flame to be a living thing like himself, does not therefore believe it to be a supernatural being—rather, so far as it is like himself, it, like himself, is not supernatural” (Introduction to the History of Religions, p. 55).

115 See Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 506, and Nat. Tr., p. 512.

116 This is the ritual and mythical theme which Frazer studies in his Golden Bough.

117 The Melanesians, p. 119.

118 Ibid., p. 125.

119 There are sometimes, as it seems, even funeral offerings. (See Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, in North Queensland Ethnog., Bulletin No. 5, § 69 c., and Burial Customs, in ibid., No. 10, in Records of the Australian Museum, Vol. VI, No. 5, p. 395). But these offerings are not periodical.

120 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 538, 553, and Nor. Tr., pp. 463, 543, 547.

121 See especially, Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, ch. vi, vii, ix.

122 The Religions of Primitive Peoples, pp. 47 ff.

123 Myth, Ritual and Religions, p. 123.

124 Les Religions des peuples non civilisés, II, Conclusion.

125 The Religion of the Semites, 2 ed., pp. 126, 132.

126 This is the reasoning of Westermarck (Origins of Human Marriage, p. 6).

127 By sexual communism we do not mean a state of promiscuity where man knows no matrimonial rules: we believe that such a state has never existed. But it has frequently happened that groups of men have been regularly united to one or several women.

128 See our Suicide, pp. 233 ff.

129 Spencer, Principles of Sociology, I, pp. 129 f.

130 The Melanesians, p. 123.

131 Dorsey, A Study of Siouan Cults, in XIth Annual Report of the Bureau of Amer. Ethnology, pp. 431 ff., and passim.

132 La religion des peuples non civilisés, I, p. 248.

133 V. W. de Visser, De Graecorum diis non referentibus speciem humanam. Cf. P. Perdrizet, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, 1899, p. 635.

134 However, according to Spencer, there is a germ of truth in the belief in spirits: this is the idea that “the power which manifests itself inside the consciousness is a different form of power from that manifested outside the consciousness” (Ecclesiastical Institutions, § 659). Spencer understands by this that the notion of force in general is the sentiment of the force which we have extended to the entire universe; this is what animism admits implicitly when it peoples nature with spirits analogous to our own. But even if this hypothesis in regard to the way in which the idea of force is formed were true—and it requires important reservations which we shall make (Bk. III, ch. iii, § 3)—it has nothing religious about it; it belongs to no cult. It thus remains that the system of religious symbols and rites, the classification of things into sacred and profane, all that which is really religious in religion, corresponds to nothing in reality. Also, this germ of truth, of which he speaks, is still more a germ of error, for if it be true that the forces of nature and those of the mind are related, they are profoundly distinct, and one exposes himself to grave misconceptions in identifying them.

135 This is undoubtedly what explains the sympathy which folk-lorists like Mannhardt have felt for animistic ideas. In popular religions as in inferior religions, these spiritual beings of a second order hold the first place.

136 In the essay entitled Comparative Mythology (pp. 47 ff).

137 Herabkunft des Feuers und Gōttertranks, Berlin, 1859 (a new edition was given by Ernst Kuhn in 1886). Cf. Der Schuss des Wilden Jägers auf den Sonnen-hirsch, Zeitschrift f. d. Phil., I, 1869, pp. 89-169. Entwickelungsstufen des Mythus, Abhandl. d. Berl. Akad., 1873.

138 Der Ursprung der Mythologie, Berlin, 1860.

139 In his book Hercule et Cacus. Étude de mythologie comparée. Max Müller’s Comparative Mythology is there signalized as a work “which marks a new epoch in the history of Mythology” (p. 12).

140 Die Griechischen Kulte und Mythen, I, p. 78.

141 Among others who have adopted this conception may be cited Renan. See his Nouvelles études d’histoire religieuse, 1884, p. 31.

142 Aside from the Comparative Mythology, the works where Max Müller has exposed his general theories on religion are: Hibbert Lectures (1878) under the title The Origin and Development of Religion; Natural Religion (1889); Physical Religion (1890); Anthropological Religion (1892); Theosophy, or Psychological Religion (1893); Contributions to the Science of Mythology (1897). Since his mythological theories are closely related to his philosophy of language, these works should be consulted in connection with the ones consecrated to language or logic, especially Lectures on the Science of Language, and The Science of Thought.

143 Natural Religion, p. 114.

144 Physical Religion, pp. 119-120.

145 Ibid., p. 121; cf. p. 304.

146 Natural Religion, pp. 121 ff., and 149-155.

147 “The overwhelming pressure of the infinite” (ibid., p. 138).

148 Ibid., pp. 195-196.

149 Max Müller even goes so far as to say that until thought has passed this first stage, it has very few of the characteristics which we now attribute to religion (Physic. Rel., p. 120).

150 Physic. Rel., p. 128.

151 The Science of Thought, p. 30.

152 Natural Religion, pp. 393 ff.

153 Physic. Rel., p. 133; The Science of Thought, p. 219; Lectures on the Science of Language, II, pp. 1 ff.

154 The Science of Thought, p. 272.

155 The Science of Thought, I, p. 327; Physic. Rel., pp. 125 ff.

156 Mélanges de mythologie et de linguistique, p. 8.

157 Anthropological Religion, pp. 128-130.

158 This explanation is not as good as that of Tylor. According to Max Müller, men could not admit that life stopped with death; therefore they concluded that there were two beings within them, one of which survived the body. But it is hard to see what made them think that life continued after the body was decomposed.

159 For the details, see Anthrop. Rel., pp. 351 ff.

160 Anthrop. Rel., p. 130.—This is what keeps Max Müller from considering Christianity the climax of all this development. The religion of ancestors, he says, supposes that there is something divine in man. Now is that idea not the one at the basis of the teaching of Christ? (ibid., pp. 378 ff.). It is useless to insist upon the strangeness of the conception which makes Christianity the latest of the cults of the dead.

161 See the discussion of the hypothesis in Gruppe, Griechishen Kulte und Mythen, pp. 79-184.

162 See Meillet, Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indo-européennes, p. 119.

163 Oldenberg, Die Religion des Vedas, pp. 59 ff.; Meillet, Le dieu Iranien Mythra, in Journal Asiatique, X, No. 1, July-August, 1907, pp. 143 ff.

164 In this category are a large number of the maxims of popular wisdom.

165 It is true that this argument does not touch those who see in religion a code (especially of hygiene) whose provisions, though placed under the sanction of imaginary beings, are nevertheless well founded. But we shall not delay to discuss a conception so insupportable, and which has, in fact, never been sustained in a systematic manner by persons somewhat informed upon the history of religions. It is difficult to see what good the terrible practices of the initiation bring to the health which they threaten; what good the dietetic restrictions, which generally deal with perfectly clean animals, have hygienically; how sacrifices, which take place far from a house, make it more solid, etc. Undoubtedly there are religious precepts which at the same time have a practical utility; but they are lost in the mass of others, and even the services which they render are frequently not without some drawbacks. If there is a religiously enforced cleanliness, there is also a religious filthiness which is derived from these same principles. The rule which orders a corpse to be carried away from the camp because it is the seat of a dreaded spirit is undoubtedly useful. But the same belief requires the relatives to anoint themselves with the liquids which issue from a corpse in putrefaction, because they are supposed to have exceptional virtues.—From this point of view, magic has served a great deal more than religion.

166 Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, pp. 68 f.

167 Lectures on the Science of Language, II, p. 456 ff.; Physic. Rel., pp. 276 ff.—Also Bréal, Mélanges, p. 6, “To bring the necessary clarity into this question of the origin of mythology, it is necessary to distinguish carefully the gods, which are the immediate product of the human intelligence, from the fables, which are its indirect and involuntary product.”

168 Max Müller recognized this. See Physic. Rel., p. 132, and Comparative Mythology, p. 58. “The gods are nomina and not numina, names without being and not beings without name.”

169 It is true that Max Müller held that for the Greeks, “Zeus was, and remained, in spite of all mythological obscurations, the name of the Supreme Deity” (Science of Language, II, p. 478). We shall not dispute this assertion, though it is historically contestable; but in any case, this conception of Zeus could never have been more than a glimmer in the midst of all the other religious beliefs of the Greeks.
Besides this, in a later work, Max Müller went so far as to make even the notion of god in general the product of a wholly verbal process and thus of a mythological elaboration (Physic. Rel., p. 138).

170 Undoubtedly outside the real myths there were always fables which were not believed, or at least were not believed in the same way and to the same degree, and hence had no religious character. The line of demarcation between fables and myths is certainly floating and hard to determine. But this is no reason for making all myths stories, any more than we should dream of making all stories myths. There is at least one characteristic which in a number of cases suffices to differentiate the religious myth: that is its relation to the cult.

171 See above, p. 28.

172 More than that, in the language of Max Müller, there is a veritable abuse of words. Sensuous experience, he says, implies, at least in certain cases, “beyond the known, something unknown, something which I claim the liberty to call infinite” (Natural Rel., p. 195; cf. p. 218). The unknown is not necessarily the infinite, any more than the infinite is necessarily the unknown if it is in all points the same, and consequently like the part which we know. It would be necessary to prove that the part of it which we perceive differs in nature from that which we do not perceive.

173 Max Müller involuntarily recognizes this in certain passages. He confesses that he sees little difference between Agni, the god of fire, and the notion of ether, by which the modern physicist explains light and heat (Phys. Rel., pp. 126 f.). Also, he connects the notion of divinity to that of agency (p. 138) or of a causality which is not natural and profane. The fact that religion represents the causes thus imagined, under the form of personal agents, is not enough to explain how they got a sacred character. A personal agent can be profane, and also, many religious forces are essentially impersonal.

174 We shall see below, in speaking of the efficacy of rites and faith, how these illusions are to be explained (Bk. III, ch. ii).

175 Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter.

176 This idea was so common that even M. Réville continued to make America the classic land of totemism (Religions des peuples non civilisés, I, p. 242).

177 Journals of Two Expeditions in North-West and Western Australia, II, p. 228.

178 The Worship of Animals and Plants. Totems and Totemism (1869, 1870).

179 This idea is found already very clearly expressed in a study by Gallatin entitled Synopsis of the Indian Tribes (Archæologia Americana, II, pp. 109 ff.), and in a notice by Morgan in the Cambrian Journal, 1860, p. 149.

180 This work had been prepared for and preceded by two others by the same author: The League of the Iroquois (1851), and Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871).

181 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, 1880.

182 In the very first volumes of the Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology are found the study of Powell, Wyandot Government (I, p. 59), that of Cushing, Zuñi Fetiches (II, p. 9), Smith, Myths of the Iroquois (ibid., p. 77), and the important work of Dorsey, Omaha Sociology (III, p. 211), which are also contributions to the study of totemism.

183 This first appeared, in an abridged form, in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.).

184 In his Primitive Culture, Tylor had already attempted an explanation of totemism, to which we shall return presently, but which we shall not give here; for by making totemism only a particular case of the ancestor-cult, he completely misunderstood its importance. In this chapter we mention only those theories which have contributed to the progress of the study of totemism.

185 Published at Cambridge, 1885.

186 First edition, 1889. This is the arrangement of a course given at the University of Aberdeen in 1888. Cf. the article Sacrifice in the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th edition).

187 London, 1890. A second edition in three volumes has since appeared (1900) and a third in five volumes is already in course of publication.

188 In this connection must be mentioned the interesting work of Sidney Hartland, The Legend of Perseus, 3 vols., 1894-1896.

189 We here confine ourselves to giving the names of the authors; their works will be indicated below, when we make use of them.

190 If Spencer and Gillen have been the first to study these tribes in a scientific and thorough manner, they were not the first to talk about them. Howitt had already described the social organization of the Wuaramongo (Warramunga of Spencer and Gillen) in 1888 in his Further Notes on the Australian Classes in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute (hereafter, J.A.I.), pp. 44 f. The Arunta had already been briefly studied by Schulze (The Aborigines of the Upper and Middle Finke River, in Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, Vol. XIV, fasc. 2): the organization of the Chingalee (the Tjingilli of Spencer and Gillen), the Wombya, etc., by Mathews (Wombya Organization of the Australian Aborigines, in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. II, p. 494; Divisions of some West Australian Tribes, ibid., p. 185; Proceedings Amer. Philos. Soc., XXXVII, pp. 151-152, and Journal Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXII, p. 71 and XXXIII, p. 111). The first results of the study made of the Arunta had also been published already in the Report on the Work of the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia, Pt. IV (1896). The first part of this Report is by Stirling, the second by Gillen; the entire publication was placed under the direction of Baldwin Spencer.

191 London, 1899. Hereafter, Native Tribes or Nat. Tr.

192 London, 1904. Hereafter, Northern Tribes or Nor. Tr.

193 We write the Arunta, the Anula, the Tjingilli, etc., without adding the characteristic s of the plural. It does not seem very logical to add to these words, which are not European, a grammatical sign which would have no meaning except in our languages. Exceptions to this rule will be made when the name of the tribe has obviously been Europeanized (the Hurons for example).

194 Strehlow has been in Australia since 1892; at first he lived among the Dieri, and from them he went to the Arunta.

195 Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral Australien. Four fascicules have been published up to the present. The last appeared at the moment when the present book was finished, so it could not be used. The two first have to do with the myths and legends, and the third with the cult. It is only just to add to the name of Strehlow that of von Leonhardi, who has had a great deal to do with this publication. Not only has he charged himself with editing the manuscripts of Strehlow, but by his judicious questions he has led the latter to be more precise on more than one point. It would be useful also to consult an article which von Leonhardi gave the Globus, where numerous extracts from his correspondence with Strehlow will be found (Ueber einige religiöse und totemistische Vorstellungen der Aranda und Loritja in Zentral Australien, in Globus, XCI, p. 285). Cf. an article on the same subject by N. W. Thomas in Folk-lore, XVI, pp. 428 ff.

196 Spencer and Gillen are not ignorant of it, but they are far from possessing it as thoroughly as Strehlow.

197 Notably by Klaatsch, Schlussbericht über meine Reise nach Australien, in Zeitschrift f. Ethnologie, 1907, pp. 635 ff.

198 The book of K. Langloh Parker, The Euahlayi Tribe, that of Eylmann, Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Südaustralien; that of John Mathews, Two Representative Tribes of Queensland, and certain recent articles of Mathews all show the influence of Spencer and Gillen.

199 A list of these publications will be found in the preface to his Nat. Tr., pp. 8-9.

200 London, 1904. Hereafter we shall cite this work by the abbreviation Nat. Tr., but always mentioning the name of Howitt, to distinguish it from the first work of Spencer and Gillen, which we abbreviate in the same manner.

201 Totemism and Exogamy, 4 vols., London, 1910. The work begins with a re-edition of Totemism, reproduced without any essential changes.

202 It is true that at the end and at the beginning there are some general theories on totemism, which will be described and discussed below. But these theories are relatively independent of the collection of facts which accompanies them, for they had already been published in different articles in reviews, long before this work appeared. These articles are reproduced in the first volume (pp. 89-172).

203 Totemism, p. 12.

204 Ibid., p. 15.

205 Ibid., p. 32.

206 It should be noted that in this connection, the more recent work, Totemism and Exogamy, shows an important progress in the thought as well as the method of Frazer. Every time that he describes the religious or domestic institutions of a tribe, he sets himself to determine the geographic and social conditions in which this tribe is placed. Howsoever summary these analyses may be, they bear witness nevertheless to a rupture with the old methods of the anthropological school.

207 Undoubtedly we also consider that the principal object of the science of religions is to find out what the religious nature of man really consists in. However, as we do not regard it as a part of his constitutional make-up, but rather as the product of social causes, we consider it impossible to find it, if we leave aside his social environment.

208 We cannot repeat too frequently that the importance which we attach to totemism is absolutely independent of whether it was ever universal or not.

209 This is the case with the phratries and matrimonial classes; on this point, see Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, ch. iii; Howitt, Native Tribes, pp. 109 and 137-142; Thomas, Kinship and Marriage in Australia, ch. vi and vii.

210 Division du Travail social, 3rd ed., p. 150.

211 It is to be understood that this is not always the case. It frequently happens, as we have already said, that the simpler forms aid to a better understanding of the more complex. On this point, there is no rule of method which is applicable to every possible case.

212 Thus the individual totemism of America will aid us in understanding the function and importance of that in Australia. As the latter is very rudimentary, it would probably have passed unobserved.

213 Besides, there is not one unique type of totemism in America, but several different species which must be distinguished.

214 We shall leave this field only very exceptionally, and when a particularly instructive comparison seems to us to impose itself.

215 This is the definition given by Cicero: Gentiles sunt qui inter se eodem nomine sunt (Top. 6). (Those are of the same gens who have the same name among themselves.)

216 It may be said in a general way that the clan is a family group, where kinship results solely from a common name; it is in this sense that the gens is a clan. But the totemic clan is a particular sort of the class thus constituted.

217 In a certain sense, these bonds of solidarity extend even beyond the frontiers of the tribe. When individuals of different tribes have the same totem, they have peculiar duties towards each other. This fact is expressly stated for certain tribes of North America (see Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, III, pp. 57, 81, 299, 356-357). The texts relative to Australia are less explicit. However, it is probable that the prohibition of marriage between members of a single totem is international.

218 Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 165.

219 In Australia the words employed differ with the tribes. In the regions observed by Grey, they said Kobong; the Dieri say Murdu (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 91); the Narrinyeri, Ngaitye (Talpin, in Curr, II, p. 244); the Warramunga, Mungái or Mungáii (Nor. Tr., p. 754), etc.

220 Indian Tribes of the United States, IV, p. 86.

221 This fortune of the word is the more regrettable since we do not even know exactly how it is written. Some write totam, others toodaim, or dodaim, or ododam (see Frazer, Totemism, p. 1). Nor is the meaning of the word determined exactly. According to the report of the first observer of the Ojibway, J. Long, the word totam designated the protecting genius, the individual totem, of which we shall speak below (Bk. II, ch. iv) and not the totem of the clan. But the accounts of other explorers say exactly the contrary (on this point, see Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, III, pp. 49-52).

222 The Wotjobaluk (p. 121) and the Buandik (p. 123).

223 The same.

224 The Wolgal (p. 102), the Wotjobaluk and the Buandik.

225 The Muruburra (p. 117), the Wotjobaluk and the Buandik.

226 The Buandik and the Kaiabara (p. 116). It is to be remarked that all the examples come from only five tribes.

227 Thus, out of 204 kinds of totems, collected by Spencer and Gillen out of a large number of tribes, 188 are animals or plants. The inanimate objects are the boomerang, cold weather, darkness, fire, lightning, the moon, red ochre, resin, salt water, the evening star, a stone, the sun, water, the whirlwind, the wind and hail-stones (Nor. Tr., p. 773. Cf. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, I, pp. 253-254).

228 Frazer (Totemism, pp. 10 and 13) cites a rather large number of cases and puts them in a special group which he calls split-totems, but these are taken from tribes where totemism is greatly altered, such as in Samoa or the tribes of Bengal.

229 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 107.

230 See the tables collected by Strehlow, op. cit., II, pp. 61-72 (cf. III, pp. xiii-xvii). It is remarkable that these fragmentary totems are taken exclusively from animal totems.

231 Strehlow, II, pp. 52 and 72.

232 For example, one of these totems is a cave where an ancestor of the Wild Cat totem rested; another is a subterranean gallery which an ancestor of the Mouse clan dug, etc. (ibid., p. 72).

233 Nat. Tr., pp. 561 ff. Strehlow, II, p. 71, note 2. Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 426 ff.; On Australian Medicine Men, J.A.I., XVI, p. 53; Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems, J.A.I., XVIII, pp. 63 ff.

234 Thaballa means “laughing boy,” according to the translation of Spencer and Gillen. The members of the clan which bear this name think they hear him laughing in the rocks which are his residence (Nor. Tr., pp. 207, 215, 226 note). According to a myth given on p. 422, there was an initial group of mythical Thaballa (cf. p. 208). The clan of the Kati, “full-grown men,” as Spencer and Gillen say, seems to be of the same sort (Nor. Tr., p. 207).

235 Nor. Tr., pp. 226 ff.

236 Strehlow, II, pp. 71 f. He mentions a totem of the Loritja and Arunta which is very close to the serpent Wollunqua: it is the totem of a mythical water-snake.

237 This is the case with Klaatsch, in the article already cited (see above, p. 92, n. 3).

238 As we indicated in the preceding chapter, totemism is at the same time of interest for the question of religion and that of the family, for the clan is a family. In the lower societies, these two problems are very closely connected. But both are so complex that it is indispensable to treat them separately. Also, the primitive family organization cannot be understood before the primitive religious beliefs are known; for the latter serve as the basis of the former. This is why it is necessary to study totemism as a religion before studying the totemic clan as a family group.

239 See Taplin, The Narrinyeri Tribe, in Curr, II, pp. 244 f.; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 131.

240 Nor. Tr., pp. 163, 169, 170, 172. It is to be noted that in all these tribes, except the Mara and the Anula, the transmission of the totem in the paternal line is only a general rule, which has exceptions.

241 According to Spencer and Gillen (Nat. Tr., pp. 123 ff.), the soul of the ancestor becomes reincarnate in the body of the mother and becomes the soul of the child; according to Strehlow (II, pp. 51 ff.), the conception, though being the work of the ancestor, does not imply any reincarnation; but in neither interpretation does the totem of the child necessarily depend upon that of the parents.

242 Nat. Tr., p. 133; Strehlow, II, p. 53.

243 It is in large part the locality where the mother believes that she conceived which determines the totem of the child. Each totem, as we shall see, has its centre and the ancestors preferably frequent the places serving as centres for their respective totems. The totem of the child is therefore that which belongs to the place where the mother believes that she conceived. As this should generally be in the vicinity of the place which serves as totemic centre for her husband, the child should generally follow the totem of his father. It is undoubtedly this which explains why the greater part of the inhabitants of a given locality belong to the same totem (Nat. Tr., p. 9).

244 The Secret of the Totem, pp. 159 ff. Cf. Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 40 f.; John Mathews, Eaglehawk and Crow; Thomas, Kinship and Marriage in Australia, pp. 52 ff.

245 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 124.

246 Howitt, pp. 121, 123, 124; Curr, III, p. 461.

247 Howitt, p. 126.

248 Howitt, pp. 98 ff.

249 Curr, II, p. 165; Brough Smyth, I, p. 423; Howitt, op. cit., p. 429.

250 Howitt, pp. 101, 102.

251 J. Mathews, Two Representative Tribes of Queensland, p. 139.

252 Still other reasons could be given in support of this hypothesis, but it would be necessary to bring in considerations relative to the organization of the family, and we wish to keep these two studies separate. Also this question is only of secondary interest to our subject.

253 For example, Mukwara, which is the name of a phratry among the Barkinji, the Paruinji and the Milpulko, designates the eagle-hawk, according to Brough Smyth; now one of the clans of this phratry has the eagle-hawk as totem. But here the animal is designated by the word Bilyara. Many cases of the same thing are cited by Lang, op. cit., p. 162.

254 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 115. According to Howitt (op. cit., pp. 121 and 454), among the Wotjobaluk, the clan of the pelican is found in the two phratries equally. This fact seems doubtful to us. It is very possible that the two clans may have two varieties of pelicans as totems. Information given by Mathews on the same tribe seems to point to this (Aboriginal Tribes of N.S. Wales and Victoria, in Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of N.S. Wales, 1904, pp. 287 f.).

255 In connection with this question, see our memoir on Le Totémisme, in the Année Sociologique, Vol. V, pp. 82 ff.

256 On the question of Australian matrimonial classes in general, see our memoir on La Prohibition de l’inceste, in the Année Soc., I, pp. 9 ff., and especially for the tribes with eight classes, L’Organisation matrimoniale des societés Australiennes, in Année Soc., VIII, pp. 118-147.

257 This principle is not maintained everywhere with an equal strictness. In the central tribes of eight classes notably, beside the class with which marriage is regularly permitted, there is another with which a sort of secondary concubinage is allowed (Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 106). It is the same with certain tribes of four classes. Each class has a choice between the two classes of the other phratry. This is the case with the Kabi (see Mathews, in Curr, III, 162).

258 See Roth, Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines, pp. 56 ff.; Palmer, Notes on some Australian Tribes, J.A.I., XIII (1884), pp. 302 ff.

259 Nevertheless, some tribes are cited where the matrimonial classes bear the names of animals or plants: this is the case with the Kabi (Mathew, Two Representative Tribes, p. 150), the tribes observed by Mrs. Bates (The Marriage Laws and Customs of the West Australian Aborigines, in Victorian Geographical Journal, XXIII-XXIV, p. 47), and perhaps in two tribes observed by Palmer. But these facts are very rare and their significance badly established. Also, it is not surprising that the classes, as well as the sexual groups, should sometimes adopt the names of animals. This exceptional extension of the totemic denominations in no way modifies our conception of totemism.

260 Perhaps the same explanation is applicable to certain other tribes of the South-East and the East where, if we are to believe the informers of Howitt, totems specially attached to each matrimonial class are to be found. This is the case among the Wiradjuri, the Wakelbura and the Bunta-Murra on the Bulloo River (Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 210, 221, 226). However, the evidence collected is suspect, according to his own admission. In fact, it appears from the lists which he has drawn up, that many totems are found equally in the two classes of the same phratry.
The explanation which we propose, after Frazer (Totemism and Exogamy, pp. 531 ff.), raises one difficulty. In principle, each clan and consequently each totem, is represented equally in the two classes of a single phratry, since one of the classes is that of the children and the other that of the parents from whom the former get their totems. So when the clans disappeared, the totemic interdictions which survived should have remained in both matrimonial classes, while in the actual cases cited, each class has its own. Whence comes this differentiation? The example of the Kaiabara (a tribe of southern Queensland) allows us to see how it may have come about. In this tribe, the children have the totem of their mother, but it is particularized by some distinctive mark. If the mother has the black eagle-hawk as totem, the child has the white eagle-hawk (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 229). This appears to be the beginning of a tendency for the totems to differentiate themselves according to the matrimonial classes.

261 A tribe of only a few hundred members frequently has fifty or sixty clans, or even many more. On this point, see Durkheim and Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, in the Année Sociologique, Vol. VI, p. 28, n. 1.

262 Except among the Pueblo Indians of the South-West, where they are more numerous. See Hodge, Pueblo Indian Clans, in American Anthropologist, 1st series, Vol. IX, pp. 345 ff. It may always be asked whether the groups which have these totems are clans or sub-clans.

263 See the tables arranged by Morgan, Ancient Society, pp. 153-185.

264 Krause, Die Tlinkit-Indianer, p. 112; Swanton, Social Condition, Beliefs and Linguistic Relationship of the Tlingit Indians, in XXVIth Rep., p. 308.

265 Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida, p. 62.

266 “The distinction between the two clans is absolute in every respect,” says Swanton, p. 68; he gives the name clan to what we call phratries. The two phratries, he says elsewhere, are like two foreign nations in their relations to each other.

267 Among the Haida at least, the totem of the real clans is altered more than that of the phratries. In fact, usage permits a clan to sell or give away the right of bearing its totem, as a result of which each clan has a number of totems, some of which it has in common with other clans (see Swanton, pp. 107 and 268). Since Swanton calls the phratries clans, he is obliged to give the name of family to the real clans, and of household to the regular families. But the real sense of his terminology is not to be doubted.

268 Journals of two Expeditions in N.W. and W. Australia, II, p. 228.

269 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 165.

270 Indian Tribes, I, p. 420; cf. I, p. 52. This etymology is very doubtful. Cf. Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (Smithsonian Inst. Bur. of Ethnol., Pt. II, s.v., Totem, p. 787).

271 Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, III, 184; Garrick Mallery, Picture Writing of the American Indians, in Tenth Report, 1893, p. 377.

272 Hearne, Journey to the Northern Ocean, p. 148 (quoted from Frazer, Totemism, p. 30).

273 Charlevoix, Histoire et description de la Nouvelle France, V, p. 329.

274 Krause, Tlinkit-Indianer, p. 248.

275 Erminnie A. Smith, Myths of the Iroquois, in Sec. Rep. of the Bur. of Ethnol., p. 78.

276 Dodge, Our Wild Indians, p. 225.

277 Powell, Wyandot Government, in First Rep. of the Bur. of Ethnol., 1881, p. 64.

278 Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, in Third Rep., pp. 229, 240, 248.

279 Krause, op. cit., pp. 130 f.

280 Krause, p. 308.

281 See a photograph of a Haida village in Swanton, op. cit., Pl. IX. Cf. Tylor, Totem Post of the Haida Village of Masset, J.A.I., New Series I, p. 133.

282 Hill Tout, Report on the Ethnology of the Statlumh of British Columbia, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 155.

283 Krause, op. cit., p. 230; Swanton, Haida, pp. 129, 135 ff.; Schoolcraft, op. cit., I, pp. 52-53, 337, 356. In the latter case the totem is represented upside down, in sign of mourning. Similar usages are found among the Creek (C. Swan, in Schoolcraft, V, p. 265) and the Delaware (Heckewelder, An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania, pp. 246-247).

284 Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., pp. 168, 537, 540.

285 Ibid., p. 174.

286 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, I, p. 99 n.

287 Brough Smyth, I, p. 284. Strehlow cites a fact of the same sort among the Arunta (III, p. 68).

288 An Account of the English Colony in N.S. Wales, II, p. 381.

289 Krause, p. 237.

290 Swanton, Social Condition, Beliefs and Linguistic Relationship of the Tlingit Indians, in XXVIth Rep., pp. 435 ff.; Boas, The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, p. 358.

291 Frazer, Totemism, p. 26.

292 Bourke, The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, p. 229; J. W. Fewkes, The Group of Tusayan Ceremonials called Katcinas, in XVth Rep., 1897, pp. 151-263.

293 Müller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 327.

294 Schoolcraft, op. cit., III, p. 269.

295 Dorsey, Omaha Sociol., Third Rep., pp. 229, 238, 240, 245.

296 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 451.

297 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 257.

298 The meaning of these relations will be seen below (Bk. II, ch. iv).

299 Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 296.

300 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 744-746; cf. p. 129.

301 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 66 n. It is true that other informers contest this fact.

302 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 744.

303 Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida, pp. 41 ff., Pl. XX and XXI; Boas, The Social Organization of the Kwakiutl, p. 318; Swanton, Tlingit, Pl. XVI ff.—In one place, outside the two ethnographic regions which we are specially studying, these tattooings are put on the animals which belong to the clan. The Bechuana of South Africa are divided into a certain number of clans; there are the people of the crocodile, the buffalo, the monkey, etc. Now the crocodile people, for example, make an incision in the ears of their cattle whose form is like the jaws of this animal (Casalis, Les Basoutos, p. 221). According to Robertson Smith, the same custom existed among the ancient Arabs (Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, pp. 212-214).

304 However, according to Spencer and Gillen, there are some which have no religious sense (see Nat. Tr., pp. 41 f.; Nor. Tr., pp. 45, 54-56).

305 Among the Arunta, this rule has exceptions which will be explained below.

306 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 162; Nor. Tr., pp. 179, 259, 292, 295 f.; Schulze, loc. cit., p. 221. The thing thus represented is not always the totem itself, but one of those things which, being associated to this totem, are regarded as being in the same family of things.

307 This is the case, for example, among the Warramunga, the Walpari, the Wulmala, the Tjingilli, the Umbaia and the Unmatjera (Nor. Tr., 339, 348). Among the Warramunga, at the moment when the design is executed, the performers address the initiated with the following words: “That mark belongs to your place; do not look out along another place.” “This means,” say Spencer and Gillen, “that the young man must not interfere with ceremonies belonging to other totems than his own: it also indicates the very close association which is supposed to exist between a man and his totem and any spot especially connected with the totem” (Nor. Tr., p. 584 and n.). Among the Warramunga, the totem is transmitted from father to child, so each locality has its own.

308 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 215, 241, 376.

309 It will be remembered (see above, p. 107) that in this tribe, the child may have a different totem than his father, his mother, or his relatives in general. Now the relatives on both sides are the performers designated for the ceremonies of initiation. Consequently, since in principle a man can have the quality of performer or officiant only for the ceremonies of his own totem, it follows that in certain cases the rites by which the young man is initiated must be in connection with a totem that is not his own. That is why the paintings made on the body of the novice do not necessarily represent his own totem: cases of this sort will be found in Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 229. That there is an anomaly here is well shown by the fact that the circumcision falls to the totem which predominates in the local group of the initiate, that is to say, to the one which would be the totem of the initiate himself, if the totemic organization were not disturbed, if among the Arunta it were what it is among the Warramunga (see Spencer and Gillen, ibid., p. 219).
The same disturbance has had another consequence. In a general way, its effect is to extend a little the bonds attaching each totem to a special group, since each totem may have members in all the local groups possible, and even in the two phratries. The idea that these ceremonies of a totem might be celebrated by an individual of another totem—an idea which is contrary to the very principles of totemism, as we shall see better after a while—has thus been accepted without too much resistance. It has been admitted that a man to whom a spirit revealed the formula for a ceremony had the right of presiding over it, even when he was not of the totem in question himself (Nat. Tr., p. 519). But that this is an exception to the rule and the product of a sort of toleration is proved by the fact that the beneficiary of the formula does not have the free disposition of it; if he transmits it—and these transmissions are frequent—it can be only to a member of the totem which the rite concerns (Nat. Tr., ibid.).

310 Nat. Tr., p. 140. In this case, the novice keeps the decoration with which he has thus been adorned until it disappears of itself by the effect of time.

311 Boas, General Report on the Indians of British Columbia in British Association for the Advancement of Science, Fifth Rep. of the Committee on the N.W. Tribes of the Dominion of Canada, p. 41.

312 There are also some among the Warramunga, but in smaller numbers than among the Arunta; they do not figure in the totemic ceremonies, though they do have a place in the myths (Nor. Tr., p. 163).

313 Other names are used by other tribes. We give a generic sense to the Arunta term because it is in this tribe that the churinga have the most important place and have been studied the best.

314 Strehlow, II, p. 81.

315 There are a few which have no apparent design (see Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 144).

316 Nat. Tr., pp. 139 and 648; Strehlow, II, p. 75.

317 Strehlow, who writes tjurunga, gives a slightly different translation to the word. “This word,” he says, “means that which is secret and personal (der eigene geheime). Tju is an old word which means hidden or secret, and runga means that which is my own.” But Kempe, who has more authority than Strehlow in this matter, translates tju by great, powerful, sacred (Kempe, Vocabulary of the Tribes inhabiting Macdonell Ranges, s.v. Tju, in Transactions of the R. Society of Victoria, Vol. XIII). At bottom, the translation of Strehlow is not so different from the other as might appear at first glance, for what is secret is hidden from the knowledge of the profane, that is, it is sacred. As for the meaning given to runga, it appears to us very doubtful. The ceremonies of the emu belong to all the members of that clan; all may participate in them; therefore they are not personal to any one of them.

318 Nat. Tr., pp. 130-132; Strehlow, II, p. 78. A woman who has seen a churinga or a man who has shown one to her are both put to death.

319 Strehlow calls this place, defined in exactly the same terms as by Spencer and Gillen, arknanaua instead of ertnatulunga (Strehlow, II, p. 78).

320 Nor. Tr., p. 270; Nat. Tr., p. 140.

321 Nat. Tr., p. 135.

322 Strehlow, II, p. 78. However, Strehlow says that if a murderer takes refuge near an ertnatulunga, he is unpityingly pursued there and put to death. We find some difficulty in conciliating this fact with the privilege enjoyed by animals, and ask ourselves if the rigour with which a criminal is treated is not something recent and should not be attributed to a weakening of the taboo which originally protected the ertnatulunga.

323 Nat. Tr., p. 248.

324 Ibid., pp. 545 f. Strehlow, II, p. 79. For example, the dust detached by rubbing a churinga with a stone, when dissolved in water, forms a potion which restores health to sick persons.

325 Nat. Tr., pp. 545 f. Strehlow (II, p. 79) contests this fact.

326 For example, the churinga of the yam totem, if placed in the soil, make the yams grow (Nor. Tr., p. 275). It has the same power over animals (Strehlow, II, pp. 76, 78; III, pp. 3, 7).

327 Nat. Tr., p. 135; Strehlow, II, p. 79.

328 Nor. Tr., p. 278.

329 Ibid., p. 180.

330 Nor. Tr., pp. 272 f.

331 Nat. Tr., p. 135.

332 One group borrows the churinga of another with the idea that these latter will communicate some of the virtues which are in them and that their presence will quicken the vitality of the individuals and of the group (Nat. Tr., pp. 158 ff.).

333 Ibid., p. 136.

334 Each individual is united by a particular bond to a special churinga which assures him his life, and also to those which he has received as a heritage from his parents.

335 Nat. Tr., p. 154; Nor. Tr., p. 193. The churinga are so thoroughly collective that they take the place of the “message-sticks” with which the messengers of other tribes are provided, when they are sent to summon foreign groups to a ceremony (Nat. Tr., pp. 141 f.).

336 Ibid., p. 326. It should be remarked that the bull-roarers are used in the same way (Mathews, Aboriginal Tribes of N.S. Wales and Victoria, in Jour. of Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, pp. 307 f.).

337 Nat. Tr., pp. 161, 259 ff.

338 Ibid., p. 138.

339 Strehlow, I, Vorwort. in fine; II, pp. 76, 77 and 82. For the Arunta, it is the body of the ancestor itself; for the Loritja, it is only an image.

340 When a child has just been born, the mother shows the father the spot where she believes that the soul of the ancestor entered her. The father, accompanied by a few relatives, goes to this spot and looks for the churinga which the ancestor is believed to have left at the moment that he reincarnated himself. If it is found there, some old man of the group undoubtedly put it there (this is the hypothesis of Spencer and Gillen). If they do not find it, a new churinga is made in a determined manner (Nat. Tr., p. 132. Cf. Strehlow, II, p. 80).

341 This is the case among the Warramunga, the Urabunna, the Worgaia, the Umbaia, the Tjingilli and the Guangi (Nor. Tr., pp. 258, 275 f.). Then, say Spencer and Gillen, “they were regarded as of especial value because of their association with a totem” (ibid., p. 276). There are examples of the same fact among the Arunta (Nat. Tr., 156).

342 Strehlow writes tnatanja (I, pp. 4-5).

343 The Kaitish, the Ilpirra, the Unmatjera; but it is rare among the latter.

344 The pole is sometimes replaced by very long churinga, placed end to end.

345 Sometimes another smaller one is hung from the top of the nurtunja. In other cases, the nurtunja is in the form of a cross or a T. More rarely, the central support is lacking (Nat. Tr., pp. 298-300, 360-364, 627).

346 Sometimes there are even three of these cross-bars.

347 Nat. Tr,, pp. 231-234, 306-310, 627. In addition to the nurtunja and the waninga, Spencer and Gillen distinguish a third sort of sacred post or flag, called the kanana (Nat. Tr., pp. 364, 370, 629), whose functions they admit they have been unable to determine. They merely note that it “is regarded as something common to the members of all the totems.” According to Strehlow (II, p. 23, n. 2) the kanana of which Spencer and Gillen speak, is merely the nurtunja of the Wild Cat totem. As this animal is the object of a tribal cult, the veneration of which it is the object might easily be common to all the clans.

348 Nor. Tr., p. 342; Nat. Tr., p. 309.

349 Nat. Tr., p. 255.

350 Ibid., ch. x and xi.

351 Ibid., pp. 138, 144.

352 See Dorsey, Siouan Cults, XIth Rep., p. 413; Omaha Sociology, Third Rep., p. 234. It is true that there is only one sacred post for the tribe, while there is a nurtunja for each clan. But the principle is the same.

353 Nat. Tr., pp. 232, 308, 313, 334, etc.; Nor. Tr., 182, 186, etc.

354 Nat. Tr., p. 346. It is true that some say that the nurtunja represents the lance of the ancestor who was at the head of each clan in Alcheringa times. But it is only a symbolic representation of it; it is not a sort of relic, like the churinga, which is believed to come from the ancestor himself. Here the secondary character of the explanation is very noticeable.

355 Nat. Tr., pp. 614 ff., esp. p. 617; Nor. Tr., p. 749.

356 Nat. Tr., p. 624.

357 Ibid., p. 179.

358 Ibid., p. 181.

359 See the examples given in Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., Fig. 131. Here are designs, many of which evidently have the object of representing animals, plants, the heads of men, etc., though of course all are very conventional.

360 Nat. Tr., p. 617; Nor. Tr., p. 716 ff.

361 Nat. Tr., p. 145; Strehlow, II, p. 80.

362 Nat. Tr., p. 151.

363 Ibid., p. 346.

364 It cannot be doubted that these designs and paintings also have an æsthetic character; here is the first form of art. Since they are also, and even above all, a written language, it follows that the origins of design and those of writing are one. It even becomes clear that men commenced designing, not so much to fix upon wood or stone beautiful forms which charm the senses, as to translate his thought into matter (cf. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, I, p. 405; Dorsey, Siouan Cults, pp. 394 ff.).

365 See the cases in Taplin, The Narrinyeri, p. 63; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 146, 769; Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 169; Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, § 150; Wyatt, Adelaide and Encounter Bay Tribe, in Woods, p. 168; Meyer, ibid., p. 186.

366 This is the case with the Warramunga (Nor. Tr., p. 168).

367 For example, among the Warramunga, the Urabunna, the Wonghibon, the Yuin, the Wotjobaluk, the Buandik, Ngeumba, etc.

368 Among the Kaitish, if a man of the clan eats too much of his totem, the members of the other phratry have recourse to a magic operation which is expected to kill him (Nor. Tr., p. 284; cf. Nat. Tr., p. 204; Langloh Parker, The Euahlavi Tribe, p. 20).

369 Nat. Tr., p. 202, n.; Strehlow, II, p. 58.

370 Nor. Tr., p. 173.

371 Nat. Tr., pp. 207 ff.

372 See above, p. 128.

373 It should also be borne in mind that in these myths the ancestors are never represented as nourishing themselves regularly with their totem. Consumption of this sort is, on the contrary, the exception. Their ordinary food, according to Strehlow, was the same as that of the corresponding animal (see Strehlow, I, p. 4).

374 Also, this whole theory rests upon an entirely arbitrary hypothesis: Spencer and Gillen, as well as Frazer, admit that the tribes of central Australia, and especially the Arunta, represent the most archaic and consequently the purest form of totemism. We shall presently say why this conjecture seems to us to be contrary to all probability. It is even probable that these authors would not have accepted their thesis so readily if they had not refused to regard totemism as a religion and if they had not consequently misunderstood the sacred character of the totem.

375 Taplin, The Narrinyeri, p. 64; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 145 and 147; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 202; Grey, loc. cit.; Curr, III, p. 462.

376 Nor. Tr., pp. 160, 167. It is not enough that the intermediary be of another totem: as we shall see, every totem of a phratry is forbidden in a certain measure for the members of the phratry who are of a different totem.

377 Nor. Tr., p. 167. We can now explain more easily how it happens that when an interdiction is not observed, it is the other phratry which revenges this sacrilege (see above, p. 129, n. 2). It is because it has an interest in seeing that the rule is observed. In fact, they believe that when the rule is broken, the totemic species may not reproduce abundantly. Now the members of the other phratry consume it regularly: therefore it is they who are affected. That is why they revenge themselves.

378 This is the case among the Loritja (Strehlow, II, pp. 60, 61), the Worgaia, the Warramunga, the Walpari, the Mara, the Anula and the Binbinga (Nor. Tr., pp. 166, 167, 171, 173). It may be eaten by a Warramunga or a Walpari, but only when offered by a member of the other phratry. Spencer and Gillen remark (p. 167, n.), that in this regard the paternal and the maternal totems appear to be under different rules. It is true that in both cases the offer must come from the other phratry. But when it is a question of the paternal totem, or the totem properly so-called, this phratry is the one to which the totem does not belong; for the maternal totem, the contrary is the case. Probably the principle was first established for the former, then mechanically extended to the other, though the situation was different. When the rule had once become established that the prohibition protecting the totem could be neglected only on the invitation of the other phratry, it was applied also to the maternal totem.

379 For example, among the Warramunga (Nor. Tr., p. 166), the Wotjobaluk, the Buandik, the Kurnai (Howitt, pp. 146 f.) and the Narrinyeri (Taplin, The Narrinyeri, p. 63).

380 Even this is not always the case. An Arunta of the Mosquito totem must not kill this insect, even when it bothers him: he must confine himself to driving it away (Strehlow, II, p. 58; cf. Taplin, p. 63).

381 Among the Kaitish and the Unmatjera (Nor. Tr., p. 160). It even happens that in certain cases an old man gives a young one of a different totem one of his churinga, so that he may kill the donor’s totem more easily (ibid., p. 272).

382 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 146; Grey, op. cit., II, p. 228; Casalis, Basoutos, p. 221. Among these latter, “one must be purified after committing such a sacrilege.”

383 Strehlow, II, pp. 58, 59, 61.

384 Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, IIIrd Rep., pp. 225, 231.

385 Casalis, ibid.

386 Even among the Omaha, it is not certain that the interdictions of contact, certain examples of which we have just cited, are really of a totemic nature, for many of them have no direct connection with the animal that serves as totem of the clan. Thus in the sub-clan of the Eagle, the characteristic interdiction is against touching the head of a buffalo (Dorsey, op. cit., p. 239); in another sub-clan with the same totem, they must not touch verdigris, charcoal, etc. (ibid., p. 245).
We do not mention other interdictions mentioned by Frazer, such as those of naming or looking at the animal or plant, for it is still less certain that they are of totemic origin, except perhaps for certain facts observed among the Bechuana (Totemism, pp. 12-13). Frazer admits too readily—and in this regard, he has imitators—that the prohibitions against eating or touching an animal depend upon totemic beliefs. However, there is one case in Australia, where the sight of the animal seems to be forbidden. According to Strehlow (II, p. 59), among the Arunta and the Loritja, a man who has the moon as totem must not look at it very long, or he would be likely to die at the hand of an enemy. But we believe that this is a unique case. We must not forget, also, that astronomical totems were probably not primitive in Australia, so this prohibition may be the product of a complex elaboration. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that among the Euahlayi, looking at the moon is forbidden to all mothers and children, no matter what their totems may be (L. Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 53).

387 See Bk. III, ch. ii, § 2.

388 Perhaps there is no religion which makes man an exclusively profane being. For the Christian, the soul which each of us has within him and which constitutes the very essence of our being, has something sacred about it. We shall see that this conception of the soul is as old as religious thought itself. The place of man in the hierarchy of sacred things is more or less elevated.

389 Nat. Tr., p. 202.

390 Taplin, The Narrinyeri, pp. 59-61.

391 Among certain clans of the Warramunga, for example (Nor. Tr., p. 162).

392 Among the Urabunna (Nor. Tr., p. 147). Even when they tell us that the first beings were men, these are really only semi-human, and have an animal nature at the same time. This is the case with certain Unmatjera (ibid., pp. 153-154). Here we find ways of thought whose confusion disconcerts us, but which must be accepted as they are. We would denature them if we tried to introduce a clarity that is foreign to them (cf. Nat. Tr., p. 119).

393 Among the Arunta (Nat. Tr., pp. 388 ff.); and among certain Unmatjera (Nor. Tr., p. 153).

394 Nat. Tr., p. 389. Cf. Strehlow, I, pp. 2-7.

395 Nat. Tr., p. 389; Strehlow, I, pp. 2 ff. Undoubtedly there is an echo of the initiation rites in this mythical theme. The initiation also has the object of making the young man into a complete man, and on the other hand, it also implies actual surgical operations (circumcision, sub-incision, the extraction of teeth, etc.). The processes which served to form the first men would naturally be conceived on the same model.

396 This the case with the nine clans of the Moqui (Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes, IV, p. 86), the Crain clan among the Ojibway (Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 180), and the Nootka clans (Boas, VIth Rep. on the N.W. Tribes of Canada, p. 43), etc.

397 It is thus that the Turtle clan of the Iroquois took form. A group of turtles had been forced to leave the lake where they dwelt and seek another home. One of them, which was larger than the others, stood this exercise very badly owing to the heat. It made such violent efforts that it got out of its shell. The process of transformation, being once commenced, went on by itself and the turtle finally became a man who was the ancestor of the clan (Erminnie A. Smith, The Myths of the Iroquois, IInd Report, p. 77). The Crab clan of the Choctaw was formed in a similar manner. Some men surprised a certain number of crabs that lived in the neighbourhood, took them home with them, taught them to talk and to walk, and finally adopted them into their society (Catlin, North American Indians, II, p. 128).

398 For example, here is a legend of the Tsimshian. In the course of a hunt, an Indian met a black bear which took him to its home, and taught him to catch salmon and build canoes. The man stayed with the bear for two years, and then returned to his native village. But the people were afraid of him, because he was just like a bear. He could not talk or eat anything except raw food. Then he was rubbed with magic herbs and gradually regained his original form. After that, whenever he was in trouble, he called upon his bear friends, who came to aid him. He built a house and painted a bear on the foundation. His sister made a blanket for the dance, upon which a bear was designed. That is why the descendants of this sister had the bear as their emblem (Boas, Kwakiutl, p. 323. Cf. Vth Rep. on the N.W. Tribes of Canada, pp. 23, 29 ff.; Hill Tout, Report on the Ethnology of the Statlumh of British Columbia, in J.A.I., 1905, XXXV, p. 150).
Thus we see the inconveniences in making this mystical relationship between the man and the animal the distinctive characteristic of totemism, as M. Van Gennep proposes (Totémisme et méthode comparative, in Revue de l’histoire des religions, Vol. LVIII, July, 1908, p. 55). This relationship is a mythical representation of otherwise profound facts; but it may be omitted without causing the disappearance of the essential traits of totemism. Undoubtedly there are always close bonds between the people of the clan and the totemic animal, but these are not necessarily bonds of blood-relationship, though they are frequently conceived in this form.

399 There are also some Tlinkit myths in which the relationship of descent between the man and the animal is still more carefully stated. It is said that the clan is descended from a mixed union, if we may so speak, that is to say, one where either the husband or the wife was an animal of the species whose name the clan bears (see Swanton, Social Condition, Beliefs, etc., of the Tlinkit Indians, XXVIth Rep., pp. 415-418).

400 Nat. Tr., p. 284.

401 Ibid., p. 179.

402 See Bk. III, ch. ii. Cf. Nat. Tr., pp. 184, 201.

403 Ibid., pp. 204, 262, 284.

404 Among the Dieri and the Parnkalla. See Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 658, 661, 668, 669-671.

405 Among the Warramunga, the blood from the circumcision is drunk by the mother (Nor. Tr., p. 352). Among the Binbinga, the blood on the knife which was used in the sub-incision must be licked off by the initiate (ibid., p. 368). In general, the blood coming from the genital organs is regarded as especially sacred (Nat. Tr., p. 464; Nor. Tr., p. 598).

406 Nat. Tr., p. 268.

407 Ibid., pp. 144, 568.

408 Ibid., pp. 442, 464. This myth is quite common in Australia.

409 Nat. Tr., p. 627.

410 Ibid., p. 466.

411 Ibid. It is believed that if all these formalities are not rigorously observed, grave calamities will fall upon the individual.

412 Nat. Tr., p. 538; Nor. Tr., p. 604.

413 After the foreskin has been detached by circumcision, it is sometimes hidden, just like the blood; it has special virtues; for example, it assures the fecundity of certain animal and vegetable species (Nor. Tr., pp. 353 f.). The whiskers are mixed with the hair, and treated as such (ibid., pp. 604, 544). They also play a part in the myths (ibid., p. 158). As for the fat, its sacred character is shown by the use made of it in certain funeral rites.

414 This is not saying that the woman is absolutely profane. In the myths, at least among the Arunta, she plays a religious rôle much more important than she does in reality (Nat. Tr., pp. 195 f.). Even now she takes part in certain initiation rites. Finally, her blood has religious virtues (see Nat. Tr., p. 464; cf. La prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines, Année Sociol., I, pp. 41 ff.).
It is upon this complex situation of the woman that the exogamic restrictions depend. We do not speak of them here because they concern the problem of domestic and matrimonial organization more directly than the present one.

415 Nat. Tr., p. 460.

416 Among the Wakelbura, according to Howitt, p. 146; among the Bechuana, according to Casalis, Basoutos, p. 221.

417 Among the Buandik and Kurnai (Howitt, ibid.); among the Arunta (Strehlow, II, p. 58).

418 Howitt, ibid.

419 In the Tully River district, says Roth (Superstition, Magic and Medicine, in North Queensland Ethnography, No. 5, § 74), as an individual goes to sleep or gets up in the morning, he pronounces in a rather low voice the name of the animal after which he is named himself. The purpose of this practice is to make the man clever or lucky in the hunt, or be forewarned of the dangers to which he may be exposed from this animal. For example, a man who has a species of serpent as his totem is protected from bites if this invocation has been made regularly.

420 Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 64; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 147; Roth, loc. cit.

421 Strehlow, II, p. 58.

422 Howitt, p. 148.

423 Nor. Tr., pp. 159-160.

424 Ibid.

425 Ibid., p. 225; Nat. Tr., pp. 202, 203.

426 A. L. P. Cameron, On Two Queensland Tribes, in Science of Man, Australasian Anthropological Journal, 1904, VII, 28, col. I.

427 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 170.

428 Notes on some Australian Tribes, J.A.I., XIII, p. 300.

429 In Curr, Australian Race, III, p. 45; Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, I, p. 91; Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 168.

430 Durkheim and Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, in Année Sociol., VI, pp. 1 ff.

431 Curr, III, p. 461.

432 Curr and Fison were both informed by the same person, D. S. Stewart.

433 Mathews, Aboriginal Tribes of N.S. Wales and Victoria, in Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, pp. 287 f.; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 121.

434 The feminine form of the names given by Mathews is Gurogigurk and Gamatykurk. These are the forms which Howitt reproduces, with a slightly different orthography. The names are also equivalent to those used by the Mount Gambier tribe (Kumite and Kroki).

435 The native name of this clan is Dyàlup, which Mathews does not translate. This word appears to be identical with Jallup, by which Howitt designates a sub-clan of the same tribe, and which he translates “mussel.” That is why we think we can hazard this translation.

436 This is the translation of Howitt; Mathews renders the word Wartwurt, “heat of the midday sun.”

437 The tables of Mathews and Howitt disagree on many important points. It even seems that clans attributed by Howitt to the Kroki phratry are given to the Gamutch phratry by Mathews, and inversely. This proves the great difficulties that these observations present. But these differences are without interest for our present question.

438 Mrs. Langloh Parker, The Euahlayi Tribe, pp. 12 ff.

439 The facts will be found below.

440 Carr, III, p. 27. Cf. Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 112. We are merely mentioning the most characteristic facts. For details, one may refer to the memoir already mentioned on Les classifications primitives.

441 Ibid., pp. 34 ff.

442 Swanton, The Haida, pp. 13-14, 17, 22.

443 This is especially clear among the Haida. Swanton says that with them every animal has two aspects. First, it is an ordinary animal to be hunted and eaten; but it is also a supernatural being in the animal’s form, upon which men depend. The mythical beings corresponding to cosmic phenomena have the same ambiguity (Swanton, ibid., 16, 14, 25).

444 See above, p. 142. This is the case among the Gournditch-mara (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 124), in the tribes studied by Cameron near the Dead Lake, and among the Wotjobaluk (ibid., pp. 125, 250).

445 J. Mathews, Two Representative Tribes, p. 139; Thomas, Kinship and Marriage, pp. 53 f.

446 Among the Osage, for example (see Dorsey, Siouan Sociology, in XVth Rep., pp. 233 ff.).

447 At Mabuiag, an island in Torrès’ Strait (Haddon, Head Hunters, p. 132), the same opposition is found between the two phratries of the Arunta: one includes the men of a water totem, the other those of earth (Strehlow, I, p. 6).

448 Among the Iroquois there is a sort of tournament between the two phratries (Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 94). Among the Haida, says Swanton, the members of the two phratries of the Eagle and the Crow “are frequently considered as avowed enemies. Husband and wife (who must be of different phratries) do not hesitate to betray each other” (The Haida, p. 62). In Australia this hostility is carried into the myths. The two animals serving the phratries as totems are frequently represented as in a perpetual war against each other (see J. Mathews, Eaglehawk and Crow, a study of Australian Aborigines, pp. 14 ff.). In games, each phratry is the natural rival of the other (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 770).

449 So Thomas has wrongly urged against our theory of the origin of the phratries its inability to explain their opposition (Kinship and Marriage, p. 69). We do not believe that it is necessary to connect this opposition to that of the profane and the sacred (see Hertz, La prééminence de la main droite, in the Revue Philosophique, Dec., 1909, p. 559). The things of one phratry are not profane for the other; both are a part of the same religious system (see below, p. 155).

450 For example, the clan of the Tea-tree includes the grasses, and consequently herbivorous animals (see Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 169). This is undoubtedly the explanation of a particularity of the totemic emblems of North America pointed out by Boas. “Among the Tlinkit,” he says, “and all the other tribes of the coast, the emblem of a group includes the animals serving as food to the one whose name the group bears” (Fifth Rep. of the Committee, etc., British Association for the Advancement of Science, p. 25).

451 Thus, among the Arunta, frogs are connected with the totem of the gum-tree, because they are frequently found in the cavities of this tree; water is related to the water-hen; with the kangaroo is associated a sort of parrot frequently seen flying about this animal (Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 146-147, 448).

452 One of the signs of this primitive lack of distinction is that territorial bases are sometimes assigned to the classes just as to the social divisions with which they were at first confounded. Thus, among the Wotjobaluk in Australia and the Zuñi in America, things are ideally distributed among the different regions of space, just as the clans are. Now this regional distribution of things and that of the clans coincide (see De quelques formes primitives de classification, pp. 34 ff.). Classifications keep something of this special character even among relatively advanced peoples, as for example, in China (ibid., pp. 55 ff.).

453 Bridgmann, in Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, I, p. 91.

454 Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 168; Howitt, Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems, J.A.I., XVIII, p. 60.

455 Curr, III, p. 461. This is about the Mount Gambier tribe.

456 Howitt, On some Australian Beliefs, J.A.I., XIII, p. 191, n. 1.

457 Howitt, Notes on Australian Message Sticks, J.A.I., XVIII, p. 326; Further Notes, J.A.I., XVIII, p. 61, n. 3.

458 Curr, III, p. 28.

459 Mathews, Ethnological Notes on the Aboriginal Tribes of N.S. Wales and Victoria, in Journ. and Proceed. of the Royal Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 294.

460 Cf. Curr, III, p. 461; and Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 146. The expressions Tooman and Wingo are applied to the one and the other.

461 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 123.

462 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 447 ff.; cf. Strehlow, III, pp. xii ff.

463 Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 169.

464 Curr, III, p. 462.

465 Mrs. Parker, The Euahlayi Tribe, p. 20.

466 Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 151; Nat. Tr., p. 447; Strehlow, III, p. xii.

467 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 449.

468 However, there are certain tribes in Queensland where the things thus attributed to a social group are not forbidden for the members of the group: this is notably the case with the Wakelbura. It is to be remembered that in this society, it is the matrimonial classes that serve as the framework of the classification (see above, p. 144). Not only are the men of one class allowed to eat the animals attributed to this class, but they may eat no others. All other food is forbidden them (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 113; Curr, III, p. 27).
But we must not conclude from this that these animals are considered profane. In fact, it should be noticed that the individual not only has the privilege of eating them, but that he is compelled to do so, for he cannot nourish himself otherwise. Now the imperative nature of this rule is a sure sign that we are in the presence of things having a religious nature, only this has given rise to a positive obligation rather than the negative one known as an interdiction. Perhaps it is not quite impossible to see how this deviation came about. We have seen above (p. 140) that every individual is thought to have a sort of property-right over his totem and consequently over the things dependent upon it. Perhaps, under the influence of special circumstances, this aspect of the totemic relation was developed, and they naturally came to believe that only the members of the clan had the right of disposing of their totem and all that is connected with it, and that others, on the contrary, did not have the right of touching it. Under these circumstances, a tribe could nourish itself only on the food attributed to it.

469 Mrs. Parker uses the expression “multiplex totems.”

470 As examples, see the Euahlayi tribe in Mrs. Parker’s book (pp. 15 ff.) and the Wotjobaluk (Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 121 ff.; cf. the above-mentioned article of Mathews).

471 See the examples in Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 122.

472 See our De quelques formes primitives de classification, p. 28, n. 2.

473 Strehlow, II, pp. 61-72.

474 Nat. Tr., p. 112.

475 See especially Nat. Tr., p. 447, and Nor. Tr., p. 151.

476 Strehlow, III, pp. xiii-xviii. It sometimes happens that the same secondary totems are attached to two or three principal totems at the same time. This is undoubtedly because Strehlow has not been able to establish with certainty which is the principal totem.
Two interesting facts which appear from this table confirm certain propositions which we had already formulated. First, the principal totems are nearly all animals, with but rare exceptions. Also, stars are always only secondary or associated totems. This is another proof that these latter were only slowly advanced to the rank of totems and that at first the principal totems were preferably chosen from the animal kingdom.

477 According to the myth, the associate totems served as food to the men of the principal totem in the fabulous times, or, when these are trees, they gave their shade (Strehlow, III, p. xii; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 403). The fact that the associate totems are believed to have been eaten does not imply that they are considered profane; for in the mythical period, the principal totem itself was consumed by the ancestors, the founders of the clan, according to the belief.

478 Thus in the Wild Cat clan, the designs carved on the churinga represent the Hakea tree, which is a distinct totem to-day (Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 147 f.). Strehlow (III, p. xii, n. 4) says that this is frequent.

479 Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 182; Nat. Tr., pp. 151 and 297.

480 Nat. Tr., pp. 151 and 158.

481 Ibid., pp. 448 and 449.

482 Thus Spencer and Gillen speak of a pigeon called Inturrita, sometimes as a principal totem (Nat. Tr., p. 410), sometimes as an associate totem (ibid., p. 448).

483 Howitt, Further Notes, pp. 63-64.

484 Thus it comes about that the clan has frequently been confounded with the tribe. This confusion, which frequently introduces trouble into the writings of ethnologists, has been made especially by Curr (I, pp. 61 ff.).

485 This is the case especially among the Warramunga (Nor. Tr., p. 298).

486 See, for example, Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 380 and passim.

487 One might even ask if tribal totems do not exist sometimes. Thus, among the Arunta, there is an animal, the wild cat, which serves as totem to a particular clan, but which is forbidden for the whole tribe; even the people of other clans can eat it only very moderately (Nat. Tr., p. 168). But we believe that it would be an abuse to speak of a tribal totem in this case, for it does not follow from the fact that the free consumption of an animal is forbidden that this is a totem. Other causes can also give rise to an interdiction. The religious unity of the tribe is undoubtedly real, but this is affirmed with the aid of other symbols. We shall show what these are below (Bk. II, ch. ix).

488 The totems belong to the tribe in the sense that this is interested as a body in the cult which each clan owes to its totem.

489 Frazer has made a very complete collection of the texts relative to individual totemism in North America (Totemism and Exogamy, III, pp. 370-456).

490 For example, among the Hurons, the Iroquois, the Algonquins (Charlevoix, Histoire de la Nouvelle France, VI, pp. 67-70; Sagard, Le grand voyage au pays des Hurons, p. 160), or among the Thompson Indians (Teit, The Thompson Indians of British Columbia, p. 355).

491 This is the case of the Yuin (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 133), the Kurnai (ibid., p. 135), several tribes of Queensland (Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, North Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin No. 5, p. 19; Haddon, Head-Hunters, p. 193); among the Delaware (Heckewelder, An Account of the History... of the Indian Nations, p. 238), among the Thompson Indians (Teit, op. cit., p. 355), and among the Salish Statlumh (Hill Tout, Rep. of the Ethnol. of the Statlumh, J.A.I., XXXV. pp. 147 ff.).

492 Hill Tout, loc. cit., p. 154.

493 Catlin, Manners and Customs, etc., London, 1876, I, p. 36.

494 Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, new edition, VI, pp. 172 ff.

495 Charlevoix, op. cit., VI, p. 69.

496 Dorsey, Siouan Cults, XIth Rep., p. 443.

497 Boas, Kwakiutl, p. 323.

498 Hill Tout, loc. cit., p. 154.

499 Boas, Kwakiutl, p. 323.

500 Miss Fletcher, The Import of the Totem, a Study from the Omaha Tribe (Smithsonian Rep. for 1897, p. 583).—Similar facts will be found in Teit, op. cit., pp. 354, 356; Peter Jones, History of the Ojibway Indians, p. 87.

501 This is the case, for example, with the dog among the Salish Statlumh, owing to the condition of servitude in which it lives (Hill Tout, loc. cit., p. 153).

502 Langloh Parker, Euahlayi, p. 21.

503 “The spirit of a man,” says Mrs. Parker (ibid.), “is in his Yuanbeai (his individual totem), and his Yuanbeai is in him.”

504 Langloh Parker, Euahlayi, p. 20. It is the same among certain Salish (Hill Tout, Ethn. Rep. on the Stseelis and Skaulits Tribes, J.A.I., XXXIV, p. 324). The fact is quite general among the Indians of Central America (Brinton, Nagualism, a Study in Native American Folklore and History, in Proceed. of the Am. Philos. Soc., XXXIII, p. 32).

505 Parker, ibid.; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 147; Dorsey, Siouan Cults, XIth Rep., p. 443. Frazer has made a collection of the American cases and established the generality of the interdiction (Totemism and Exogamy, III, p. 450). It is true that in America, as we have seen, the individual must kill the animal whose skin serves to make what ethnologists call his medicine-sack. But this usage has been observed in five tribes only; it is probably a late and altered form of the institution.

506 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 135, 147, 387; Australian Medicine Men, J.A.I., XVI, p. 34; Teit, The Shuswap, p. 607.

507 Meyer, Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of the Encounter Bay Tribe, in Woods, p. 197.

508 Boas, VIth Rep. on the North-West Tribes of Canada, p. 93; Teit, The Thompson Indians, p. 336; Boas, Kwakiutl, p. 394.

509 Facts will be found in Hill Tout, Rep. of the Ethnol. of the Statlumh, J.A.I., XXXV, pp. 144, 145. Cf. Langloh Parker, op. cit., p. 29.

510 According to information given by Howitt in a personal letter to Frazer (Totemism and Exogamy, I, p. 495, and n. 2).

511 Hill Tout, Ethnol. Rep. on the Stseelis and Skaulits Tribes, J.A.I., XXXIV, p. 324.

512 Howitt, Australian Medicine Men, J.A.I., XVI, p. 34; Lafitau, Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains, I, p. 370; Charlevoix, Histoire de la Nouvelle France, VI, p. 68. It is the same with the atai and tamaniu in Mota (Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 250 f.).

513 Thus the line of demarcation between the animal protectors and fetishes, which Frazer has attempted to establish, does not exist. According to him, fetishism commences when the protector is an individual object and not a class (Totemism, p. 56); but it frequently happens in Australia that a determined animal takes this part (see Howitt, Australian Medicine Men, J.A.I., XVI, p. 34). The truth is that the ideas of fetish and fetishism do not correspond to any definite thing.

514 Brinton, Nagualism, in Proceed. Amer. Philos. Soc., XXXIII, p. 32.

515 Charlevoix, VI, p. 67.

516 Hill Tout, Rep. on the Ethnol. of the Statlumh of British Columbia, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 142.

517 Hill Tout, Ethnol. Rep. on the Stseelis and Skaulits Tribes, J.A.I., XXXIV, pp. 311 ff.

518 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 133.

519 Langloh Parker, op. cit., p. 20.

520 J. W. Powell, An American View of Totemism, in Man, 1902, No. 84; Tylor, ibid., No. 1; Andrew Lang has expressed analogous ideas in Social Origins, pp. 133-135. Also Frazer himself, turning from his former opinion, now thinks that until we are better acquainted with the relations existing between collective totems and “guardian spirits,” it would be better to designate them by different names (Totemism and Exogamy, III, p. 456).

521 This is the case in Australia among the Yuin (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 81), and the Narrinyeri (Meyer, Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of the Encounter Bay Tribe, in Woods, pp. 197 ff.).

522 “The totem resembles the patron of the individual no more than an escutcheon resembles the image of a saint,” says Tylor (op. cit., p. 2). Likewise, if Frazer has taken up the theory of Tylor, it is because he refuses all religious character to the totem of the clan (Totemism and Exogamy, III, p. 452).

523 See below, chapter ix of this book.

524 Yet according to one passage in Mathews, the individual totem is hereditary among the Wotjobaluk. “Each individual,” he says, “claims some animal, plant or inanimate object as his special and personal totem, which he inherits from his mother” (Journ. and Proc. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 291). But it is evident that if all the children in the same family had the personal totem of their mother, neither they nor she would really have personal totems at all. Mathews probably means to say that each individual chooses his individual totem from the list of things attributed to the clan of his mother. In fact, we shall see that each clan has its individual totems which are its exclusive property; the members of the other clans cannot make use of them. In this sense, birth determines the personal totem to a certain extent, but to a certain extent only.

525 Heckewelder, An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania, in Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, I, p. 238.

526 See Dorsey, Siouan Cults, XIth Rep., p. 507; Catlin, op. cit., I, p. 37; Miss Fletcher, The Import of the Totem, in Smithsonian Rep. for 1897, p. 580; Teit, The Thompson Indians, pp. 317-320; Hill Tout, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 144.

527 But some examples are found. The Kurnai magicians see their personal totems revealed to them in dreams (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 387; On Australian Medicine Men, in J.A.I., XVI, p. 34). The men of Cape Bedford believe that when an old man dreams of something during the night, this thing is the personal totem of the first person he meets the next day (W. E. Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, p. 19). But it is probable that only supplementary and accessory totems are acquired in this way; for in this same tribe another process is used at the moment of initiation, as we said in the text.

528 In certain tribes of which Roth speaks (ibid.); also in certain tribes near to Maryborough (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 147).

529 Among the Wiradjuri (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 406; On Australian Medicine Men, in J.A.I., XVI, p. 50).

530 Roth, loc. cit.

531 Haddon, Head Hunters, pp. 193 ff.

532 Among the Wiradjuri (same references as above, n. 4).

533 In general, it seems as though these transmissions from father to son never take place except when the father is a shaman or a magician. This is also the case among the Thompson Indians (Teit, The Thompson Indians, p. 320) and the Wiradjuri, of whom we just spoke.

534 Hill Tout (J.A.I., XXXV, pp. 146 f.). The essential rite is the blowing upon the skin: if this were not done correctly, the transmission would not take place. As we shall presently see, the breath is the soul. When both breathe upon the skin of the animal, the magician and the recipient each exhale a part of their souls, which are thus fused, while partaking at the same time of the nature of the animal, who also takes part in the ceremony in the form of its symbol.

535 N. W. Thomas, Further Remarks on Mr. Hill Tout’s Views on Totemism, in Man, 1904, p. 85.

536 Langloh Parker, op. cit., pp. 20, 29.

537 Hill Tout, in J.A.I., XXXV, pp. 143 and 146; ibid., XXXIV, p. 324.

538 Parker, op. cit., p. 30; Teit, The Thompson Indians, p. 320; Hill Tout, in J.A.I., XXXV, p. 144.

539 Charlevoix, VI, p. 69.

540 Hill Tout, ibid., p. 145.

541 Thus at the birth of a child, a tree is planted which is cared for piously; for it is believed that its fate and the child’s are united. Frazer, in his Golden Bough, gives a number of customs and beliefs translating this same idea in different ways. (Cf. Hartland, Legend of Perseus, II, pp. 1-55.)

542 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 148 ff.; Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 194, 201 ff.; Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 52. Petrie also mentions it in Queensland (Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland, pp. 62 and 118).

543 Journ. and Proc. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 339. Must we see a trace of sexual totemism in the following custom of the Warramunga? When a dead person is buried, a bone of the arm is kept. If it is a woman, the feathers of an emu are added to the bark in which it is wrapped up; if it is a man, the feathers of an owl (Nor. Tr., p. 169).

544 Some cases are cited where each sexual group has two sexual totems; thus the Wurunjerri unite the sexual totems of the Kurnai (the emu-wren and the linnet) to those of the Wotjobaluk (the bat and the nightjar owl). See Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 150.

545 Totemism, p. 51.

546 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 215.

547 Threlkeld, quoted by Mathews, loc. cit., p. 339.

548 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 148, 151.

549 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 200-203; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 149; Petrie, op. cit., p. 62. Among the Kurnai, these bloody battles frequently terminate in marriages of which they are, as it were, a sort of ritual precursor. Sometimes they are merely plays (Petrie, loc. cit.).

550 On this point, see our study on La Prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines, in the Année Sociologique, I, pp. 44 ff.

551 However, as we shall presently see (ch. ix), there is a connection between the sexual totems and the great gods.

552 Primitive Culture, I, p. 402; II, p. 237; Remarks on Totemism, with especial reference to some modern theories concerning it, in J.A.I., XXVIII, and I, New Series, p. 138.

553 Het Animisme bij den Volken van den indischen Archipel, pp. 69-75.

554 Tylor, Primitive Culture, II, p. 6.

555 Tylor, ibid., II, pp. 6-18.

556 G. McCall Theal, Records of South-Eastern Africa, VII. We are acquainted with this work only through an article by Frazer, South African Totemism, published in Man, 1901, No. III.

557 Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 32 f., and a personal letter by the same author cited by Tylor in J.A.I., XXVIII, p. 147.

558 This is practically the solution adopted by Wundt (Mythus und Religion, II, p. 269).

559 It is true that according to Tylor’s theory, a clan is only an enlarged family; therefore whatever may be said of one of these groups is, in his theory, applicable to the other (J.A.I., XXVIII, p. 157). But this conception is exceedingly contestable; only the clan presupposes a totem, which has its whole meaning only in and through the clan.

560 For this same conception, see A. Lang, Social Origins, p. 150.

561 See above, p. 63.

562 Primitive Culture, II, p. 17.

563 Wundt, who has revived the theory of Tylor in its essential lines, has tried to explain this mysterious relationship of the man and the animal in a different way: it was the sight of the corpse in decomposition which suggested the idea. When they saw worms coming out of the body, they thought that the soul was incarnate in them and escaped with them. Worms, and by extension, reptiles (snakes, lizards, etc.), were therefore the first animals to serve as receptacles for the souls of the dead, and consequently they were also the first to be venerated and to play the rôle of totems. It was only subsequently that other animals and plants and even inanimate objects were elevated to the same dignity. But this hypothesis does not have even the shadow of a proof. Wundt affirms (Mythus und Religion, II, p. 296) that reptiles are much more common totems than other animals; from this, he concludes that they are the most primitive. But we cannot see what justifies this assertion, in the support of which the author cites no facts. The lists of totems gathered either in Australia or in America do not show that any special species of animal has played a preponderating rôle. Totems vary from one region to another with the flora and fauna. Moreover, if the circle of possible totems was so closely limited at first, we cannot see how totemism was able to satisfy the fundamental principle which says that the two clans or sub-clans of a tribe must have two different totems.

564 “Sometimes men adore certain animals,” says Tylor, “because they regard them as the reincarnation of the divine souls of the ancestors; this belief is a sort of bridge between the cult rendered to shades and that rendered to animals” (Primitive Culture, II, p. 805, cf. 309, in fine). Likewise, Wundt presents totemism as a section of animalism (II, p. 234).

565 See above, p. 139.

566 Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 97 ff.

567 See above, p. 28.

568 Jevons recognizes this himself, saying, “It is to be presumed that in the choice of an ally he would prefer... the kind or species which possessed the greatest power” (p. 101).

569 2nd Edition, III, pp. 416 ff.; see especially p. 419, n. 5. In more recent articles, to be analysed below, Frazer exposes a different theory, but one which does not, in his opinion, completely exclude the one in the Golden Bough.

570 The Origin of the Totemism of the Aborigines of British Columbia, in Proc. and Transact. of the Roy. Soc. of Canada, 2nd series, VII, § 2, pp. 3 ff. Also, Report on the Ethnology of the Statlumh, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 141. Hill Tout has replies to various objections made to his theory in Vol. IX of the Transact. of the Roy. Soc. of Canada, pp. 61-99.

571 Alice C. Fletcher, The Import of the Totem, in Smithsonian Report for 1897, pp. 577-586.

572 The Kwakiutl Indians, pp. 323 ff., 336-338, 393.

573 The Development of the Clan System, in Amer. Anthrop., N.S. VI, 1904, pp. 477-486.

574 J.A.I., XXXV, p. 142.

575 Ibid., p. 150. Cf. Vth Rep. on the... N.W. Tribes of Canada, B.A.A.S., p. 24. A myth of this sort has been quoted above.

576 J.A.I., XXXV, p. 147.

577 Proc. and Transact., etc., VII, § 2, p. 12.

578 See The Golden Bough,² III, pp. 351 ff. Wilken had already pointed out similar facts in De Simsonsage, in De Gids, 1890; De Betrekking tusschen Menschen-Dieren en Plantenleven, in Indische Gids, 1884, 1888; Ueber das Haaropfer, in Revue Coloniale Internationale, 1886-1887.

579 For example, Eylmann in Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Südaustralien, p. 199.

580 Mrs. Parker says in connection with the Euahlayi, that if the Yunbeai does “confer exceptional force, it also exposes one to exceptional dangers, for all that hurts the animal wounds the man” (Euahlayi, p. 29).

581 In a later work (The Origin of Totemism, in The Fortnightly Review, May, 1899, pp. 844-845), Frazer raises this objection himself. “If,” he says, “I deposit my soul in a hare, and my brother John (a member of another clan) shoots that hare, roasts and swallows it, what becomes of my soul? To meet this obvious danger it is necessary that John should know the state of my soul, and that, knowing it, he should, whenever he shoots a hare, take steps to extract and restore to me my soul before he cooks and dines upon the animal.” Now Frazer believes that he has found this practice in use in Central Australia. Every year, in the course of a ceremony which we shall describe presently, when the animals of the new generation arrive at maturity, the first game to be killed is presented to men of that totem, who eat a little of it; and it is only after this that the men of the other clans may eat it freely. This, says Frazer, is a way of returning to the former the souls they may have confided to these animals. But, aside from the fact that this interpretation of the fact is wholly arbitrary, it is hard not to find this way of escaping the danger rather peculiar. This ceremony is annual; long days may have elapsed since the animal was killed. During all this time, what has become of the soul which it sheltered and the individual whose life depended on this soul? But it is superfluous to insist upon all the inconceivable things in this explanation.

582 Parker, op. cit., p. 20; Howitt, Australian Medicine Men, in J.A.I., XVI, pp. 34, 49 f.; Hill Tout, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 146.

583 According to Hill Tout himself, “The gift or transmission (of a personal totem) can only be made or effected by certain persons, such as shamans, or those who possess great mystery power” (J.A.I., p. 146). Cf. Langloh Parker, op. cit., pp. 29-30.

584 Cf. Hartland, Totemism and some recent Discoveries, in Folk-Lore, XI, pp. 59 ff.

585 Except perhaps the Kurnai; but even in this tribe, there are sexual totems in addition to the personal ones.

586 Among the Wotjobaluk, the Buandik, the Wiradjuri, the Yuin and the tribes around Maryborough (Queensland). See Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 114-147; Mathews, J. of the R. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 291. Cf. Thomas, Further Notes on Mr. Hill Tout’s Views on Totemism, in Man, 1904, p. 85.

587 This is the case with the Euahlayi and the facts of personal totemism cited by Howitt, Australian Medicine Men, in J.A.I., XVI, pp. 34, 35, 49-50.

588 Miss Fletcher, A Study of the Omaha Tribe, in Smithsonian Report for 1897, p. 586; Boas, The Kwakiutl, p. 322. Likewise, Vth Rep. of the Committee... of the N.W. Tribes of the Dominion of Canada, B.A.A.S., p. 25; Hill Tout, J.A.I., XXXV, p. 148.

589 The proper names of the gentes, says Boas in regard to the Tlinkit, are derived from their respective totems, each gens having its special names. The connection between the name and the (collective) totem is not very apparent sometimes, but it always exists (Vth Rep. of the Committee, etc., p. 25). The fact that individual forenames are the property of the clan, and characterize it as surely as the totem, is also found among the Iroquois (Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 78), the Wyandot (Powell, Wyandot Government, in Ist Rep., p. 59), the Shawnee, Sauk and Fox (Morgan, Ancient Society, pp. 72, 76-77) and the Omaha (Dorsey, Omaha Sociology, in IIIrd Rep., pp. 227 ff.). Now the relation between forenames and personal totems is already known (see above, p. 157).

590 “For example,” says Mathews, “if you ask a Wartwurt man what totem he is, he will first tell his personal totem, and will probably then enumerate those of his clan” (Jour. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 291).

591 The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism among the Australian Aborigines, in Fortnightly Review, July, 1905, pp. 162 ff., and Sept., p. 452. Cf. the same author, The Origin of Totemism, ibid., April, 1899, p. 648, and May, p. 835. These latter articles, being slightly older, differ from the former on one point, but the foundation of the theory is not essentially different. Both are reproduced in Totemism and Exogamy, I, pp. 89-172. In the same sense, see Spencer and Gillen, Some Remarks on Totemism as applied to Australian Tribes, in J.A.I., 1899, pp. 275-280, and the remarks of Frazer on the same subject, ibid., pp. 281-286.

592 “Perhaps we may... say that it is but one remove from the original pattern, the absolutely original form of totemism” (Fortnightly Review, Sept., 1905. p. 455).

593 On this point, the testimony of Strehlow (II, p. 52) confirms that of Spencer and Gillen. For a contrary opinion, see A. Lang, The Secret of the Totem, p. 190.

594 A very similar idea had already been expressed by Haddon in his Address to the Anthropological Section (B.A.A.S., 1902, pp. 8 ff.). He supposes that at first, each local group had some food which was especially its own. The plant or animal thus serving as the principal item of food became the totem of the group.
All these explanations naturally imply that the prohibitions against eating the totemic animal were not primitive, but were even preceded by a contrary prescription.

595 Fortnightly Review, Sept., 1905, p. 458.

596 Fortn. Rev., May, 1899, p. 835, and July, 1905, pp. 162 ff.

597 Though considering totemism only a system of magic, Frazer recognizes that the first germs of a real religion are sometimes found in it (Fortn. Rev., July, 1905, p. 163). On the way in which he thinks religion developed out of magic, see The Golden Bough,² I, pp. 75-78.

598 Sur le totemisme, in Année Soc., V, pp. 82-121. Cf., on this same question, Hartland, Presidential Address, in Folk-Lore, XI, p. 75; A. Lang, A Theory of Arunta Totemism, in Man, 1904, No. 44; Conceptional Totemism and Exogamy, ibid., 1907, No. 55; The Secret of the Totem, ch. iv; N. W. Thomas, Arunta Totemism, in Man, 1904, No. 68; P. W. Schmidt, Die Stellung der Aranda unter der Australischen Stämmen, in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1908, pp. 866 ff.

599 Die Aranda, II, pp. 57-58.

600 Schulze, loc cit., pp. 238-239.

601 In the conclusion of Totemism and Exogamy (IV, pp. 58-59), Frazer says, it must be admitted, that there is a totemism still more ancient than that of the Arunta: it is the one observed by Rivers in the Banks Islands (Totemism in Polynesia and Melanesia, in J.A.I., XXXIX, p. 172). Among the Arunta it is the spirit of an ancestor who is believed to impregnate the mother; in the Banks Islands, it is the spirit of an animal or vegetable, as the theory supposes. But as the ancestral spirits of the Arunta have an animal or vegetable form, the difference is slight. Therefore we have not mentioned it in our exposition.

602 Social Origins, London, 1903, especially ch. viii, entitled The Origin of Totem Names and Beliefs, and The Secret of the Totem, London, 1905.

603 In his Social Origins especially, Lang attempts to reconstitute by means of conjecture the form which these primitive groups should have; but it seems superfluous to reproduce these hypotheses, which do not affect his theory of totemism.

604 On this point, Lang approaches the theory of Julius Pickler (see Pickler and Szomolo, Der Ursprung des Totemismus. Ein Beitrag zur materialistirchen Geschichtstheorie, Berlin, 36 pp. in 8vo). The difference between the two hypotheses is that Pickler attributes a higher importance to the pictorial representation of the name than to the name itself.

605 Social Origins, p. 166.

606 The Secret of the Totem, p. 121; cf. pp. 116, 117.

607 The Secret of the Totem, p. 136.

608 J.A.I., Aug., 1888, pp. 53-54; cf. Nat. Tr., pp. 89, 488, 498.

609 “With reverence,” as Lang says (The Secret of the Totem, p. 111).

610 Lang adds that these taboos are the basis of exogamic practices.

611 Ibid., p. 125.

612 However, we have not spoken of the theory of Spencer. But this is because it is only a part of his general theory of the transformation of the ancestor-cult into the nature-cult. As we have described that already, it is not necessary to repeat it.

613 Except that Lang ascribes another source to the idea of the great gods: as we have already said, he believes that this is due to a sort of primitive revelation. But Lang does not make use of this idea in his explanation of totemism.

614 For example, in a Kwakiutl myth, an ancestral hero pierces the head of an enemy by pointing a finger at him (Boas, Vth Rep. on the North. Tribes of Canada, B.A.A.S., 1889, p. 30).

615 References supporting this assertion will be found on p. 128, n. 1, and p. 320, n. 1.

616 See Bk. III, ch. ii.

617 See, for example, Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 482; Schürmann, The Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln, in Woods, Nat. Tr. of S. Australia, p. 231.

618 Frazer has even taken many facts from Samoa which he presents as really totemic (See Totemism, pp. 6, 12-15, 24, etc.). It is true that we have charged Frazer with not being critical enough in the choice of his examples, but so many examples would obviously have been impossible if there had not really been important survivals of totemism in Samoa.

619 See Turner, Samoa, p. 21 and ch. iv and v.

620 Alice Fletcher, A Study of the Omaha Tribe, in Smithsonian Rep. for 1897, pp. 582 f.

621 Dorsey, Siouan Sociology, in XVth Rep., p. 238.

622 Ibid., p. 221.

623 Riggs and Dorsey, Dakota-English Dictionary, in Contrib. N. Amer. Ethnol., VII, p. 508. Many observers cited by Dorsey identify the word wakan with the words wakanda and wakanta, which are derived from it, but which really have a more precise signification.

624 XIth Rep., p. 372, § 21. Miss Fletcher, while recognizing no less clearly the impersonal character of the wakanda, adds nevertheless that a certain anthropomorphism has attached to this conception. But this anthropomorphism concerns the various manifestations of the wakanda. Men address the trees or rocks where they think they perceive the wakanda, as if they were personal beings. But the wakanda itself is not personified (Smithsonian Rep. for 1897, p. 579).

625 Riggs, Tah-Koo Wah-Kon, pp. 56-57, quoted from Dorsey, XIth Rep., p. 433, § 95.

626 XIth Rep., p. 380, § 33.

627 Ibid., p. 381, § 35.

628 Ibid., p. 376, § 28; p. 378, § 30; cf. p. 449, § 138.

629 Ibid., p. 432, § 95.

630 Ibid., p. 431, § 92.

631 Ibid., p. 433, § 95.

632 Orenda and a Definition of Religion, in American Anthropologist, 1902, p. 33.

633 Ibid., p. 36.

634 Tesa, Studi del Thavenet, p. 17.

635 Boas, Kwakiutl, p. 695.

636 Swanton, Social Condition, etc, of the Tlinkit Indians, XXVIth Rep., 1905, p. 451, n. 2.

637 Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida, p. 14; cf. Social Condition, etc., p. 479.

638 In certain Melanesian societies (Banks Islands, North New Hebrides) the two exogamic phratries are found which characterize the Australian organization (Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 23 ff.). In Florida, there are regular totems, called butos (ibid., p. 31). An interesting discussion of this point will be found in Lang, Social Origins, pp. 176 ff. On the same subject, and in the same sense, see W. H. R. Rivers, Totemism in Polynesia and Melanesia, in J.A.I., XXXIX, pp. 156 ff.

639 The Melanesians, p. 118, n. 1. Cf. Parkinson, Dreissig Jahre in der Südsee, pp. 178, 392, 394, etc.

640 An analysis of this idea will be found in Hubert and Mauss, Théorie Générale de la Magie, in Année Sociol., VII, p. 108.

641 There are not only totems of clans but also of guilds (A. Fletcher, Smithsonian Rep. for 1897, pp. 581 ff.).

642 Fletcher, op. cit., pp. 578 f.

643 Ibid., p. 583. Among the Dakota, the totem is called Wakan. See Riggs and Dorsey, Dakota Grammar, Texts and Ethnol., in Contributions N. Amer. Ethn., 1893, p. 219.

644 James’s Account of Long’s Expedition in the Rocky Mountains, I, p. 268. (Quoted by Dorsey, XIth Rep., p. 431, § 92.)

645 We do not mean to say that in principle every representation of religious forces in an animal form is an index of former totemism. But when we are dealing with societies where totemism is still apparent, as is the case with the Dakota, it is quite natural to think that these conceptions are not foreign to it.

646 See below, same book, ch. ix, § 4, pp. 285 ff.

647 The first spelling is that of Spencer and Gillen; the second, that of Strehlow.

648 Nat. Tr., p. 548, n. 1. It is true that Spencer and Gillen add: “The idea can be best expressed by saying that an Arungquiltha object is possessed of an evil spirit.” But this free translation of Spencer and Gillen is their own unjustified interpretation. The idea of the arungquiltha in no way implies the existence of spiritual beings, as is shown by the context and Strehlow’s definition.

649 Die Aranda, II, p. 76, n.

650 Under the name Boyl-ya (see Grey, Journal of Two Expeditions, II, pp. 337-338).

651 See above, p. 42. Spencer and Gillen recognize this implicitly when they say that the arungquiltha is a “supernatural force.” Cf. Hubert and Mauss, Théorie Générale de la Magie, in Année Sociol., VII, p. 119.

652 Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 191 ff.

653 Hewitt, loc. cit., p. 38.

654 There is even ground for asking whether an analogous notion is completely lacking in Australia. The word churinga, or tjurunga as Strehlow writes, has a very great similarity, with the Arunta. Spencer and Gillen say that it designates “all that is secret or sacred. It is applied both to the object and to the quality it possesses” (Nat. Tr., p. 648, s.v. churinga). This is almost a definition of mana. Sometimes Spencer and Gillen even use this word to designate religious power or force in a general way. While describing a ceremony among the Kaitish, they say that the officiant is “full of churinga,” that is to say, they continue, of the “magic power emanating from the objects called churinga.” Yet it does not seem that the notion of churinga has the same clarity and precision as that of the mana in Melanesia or of the wakan among the Sioux.

655 Yet we shall see below (this book, ch. viii and ix) that totemism is not foreign to all ideas of a mythical personality. But we shall show that these conceptions are the product of secondary formations: far from being the basis of the beliefs we have just analysed, they are derived from them.

656 Loc. cit., p. 38.

657 Rep. Peabody Museum, III, p. 276, n. (quoted by Dorsey, XIth Rep., p. 435).

658 See above, p. 35.

659 In the expressions such as Ζεὺς ὕει or Ceres succiditur, it is shown that this conception survived in Greece as well as in Rome. In his Götternamen, Usener has clearly shown that the primitive gods of Greece and Rome were impersonal forces thought of only in terms of their attributes.

660 Définition du phénomène religieux, in Année Sociol., II, pp. 14-16.

661 Preanimistic Religion, in Folk-Lore, 1900, pp. 162-182.

662 Ibid., p. 179. In a more recent work, The Conception of Mana (in Transactions of the Third International Congress for the History of Religions, II, pp. 54 ff.), Marrett tends to subordinate still further the animistic conception of mana, but his thought on this point remains hesitating and very reserved.

663 Ibid., p. 168.

664 This return of preanimism to naturism is still more marked in Clodd, Preanimistic Stages of Religion (Trans. Third Inter. Congress for the H. of Rel., I, p. 33).

665 Théorie générale de la Magie, in Année Sociol., VII, pp. 108 ff.

666 Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst, in Globus, 1904, Vol. LXXXVI, pp. 321, 355, 376, 389; 1905, Vol. LXXXVII, pp. 333, 347, 380, 394, 413.

667 Globus, LXXXVII, p. 381.

668 He clearly opposes them to all influences of a profane nature (Globus, LXXXVI, p. 379a).

669 It is found even in the recent theories of Frazer. For if this scholar denies to totemism all religious character, in order to make it a sort of magic, it is just because the forces which the totemic cult puts into play are impersonal like those employed by the magician. So Frazer recognizes the fundamental fact which we have just established. But he draws different conclusions because he recognizes religion only where there are mythical personalities.

670 However, we do not take this word in the same sense as Preuss and Marrett. According to them, there was a time in religious evolution when men knew neither souls nor spirits: a preanimistic phase. But this hypothesis is very questionable: we shall discuss this point below (Bk. II, ch. viii and ix).

671 On this same question, see an article of Alessandro Bruno, Sui fenomeni magico-religiosi della communità primitive, in Rivista italiana di Sociologia, XII Year, Fasc. IV-V, pp. 568 ff., and an unpublished communication made by W. Bogoras to the XIV Congress of the Americanists, held at Stuttgart in 1904. This communication is analysed by Preuss in the Globus, LXXXVI, p. 201.

672 “All things,” says Miss Fletcher, “are filled with a common principle of life,” Smiths. Rep. for 1897, p. 579.

673 Hewitt, in American Anthropologist, 1902, p. 36.

674 The Melanesians, pp. 118-120.

675 Ibid., p. 119.

676 See above, p. 103.

677 Pickler, in the little work above mentioned, had already expressed, in a slightly dialectical manner, the sentiment that this is what the totem essentially is.

678 See our Division du travail social, 3rd ed., pp. 64 ff.

679 Ibid., p. 76.

680 This is the case at least with all moral authority recognized as such by the group as a whole.

681 We hope that this analysis and those which follow will put an end to an inexact interpretation of our thought, from which more than one misunderstanding has resulted. Since we have made constraint the outward sign by which social facts can be the most easily recognized and distinguished from the facts of individual psychology, it has been assumed that according to our opinion, physical constraint is the essential thing for social life. As a matter of fact, we have never considered it more than the material and apparent expression of an interior and profound fact which is wholly ideal: this is moral authority. The problem of sociology—if we can speak of a sociological problem—consists in seeking, among the different forms of external constraint, the different sorts of moral authority corresponding to them and in discovering the causes which have determined these latter. The particular question which we are treating in this present work has as its principal object, the discovery of the form under which that particular variety of moral authority which is inherent in all that is religious has been born, and out of what elements it is made. It will be seen presently that even if we do make social pressure one of the distinctive characteristics of sociological phenomena, we do not mean to say that it is the only one. We shall show another aspect of the collective life, nearly opposite to the preceding one, but none the less real (see p. 212).

682 Of course this does not mean to say that the collective consciousness does not have distinctive characteristics of its own (on this point, see Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1898, pp. 273 ff.).

683 This is proved by the length and passionate character of the debates where a legal form was given to the resolutions made in a moment of collective enthusiasm. In the clergy as in the nobility, more than one person called this celebrated night the dupe’s night, or, with Rivarol, the St. Bartholomew of the estates (see Stoll, Suggestion und Hypnotismus in der Völkerpsychologie, 2nd ed., p. 618, n. 2).

684 See Stoll, op. cit., pp. 353 ff.

685 Ibid., pp. 619, 635.

686 Ibid., pp. 622 ff.

687 The emotions of fear and sorrow are able to develop similarly and to become intensified under these same conditions. As we shall see, they correspond to quite another aspect of the religious life (Bk. III, ch. v).

688 This is the other aspect of society which, while being imperative, appears at the same time to be good and gracious. It dominates us and assists us. If we have defined the social fact by the first of these characteristics rather than the second, it is because it is more readily observable, for it is translated into outward and visible signs; but we have never thought of denying the second (see our Règles de la Méthode Sociologique, preface to the second edition, p. xx, n. 1).

689 Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 50, 103, 120. It is also generally thought that in the Polynesian languages, the word mana primitively had the sense of authority (see Tregear, Maori Comparative Dictionary, s.v.).

690 See Albert Mathiez, Les origines des cultes révolutionnaires (1789-1792).

691 Ibid., p. 24.

692 Ibid., pp. 29, 32.

693 Ibid., p. 30.

694 Ibid., p. 46.

695 See Mathiez, La Théophilanthropie et la Culte décadaire, p. 36.

696 See Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 33.

697 There are even ceremonies, for example, those which take place in connection with the initiation, to which members of foreign tribes are invited. A whole system of messages and messengers is organized for these convocations, without which the great solemnities could not take place (see Howitt, Notes on Australian Message-Sticks and Messengers, in J.A.I., 1889; Nat. Tr., pp. 83, 678-691; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 159; Nor. Tr., p. 551).

698 The corrobbori is distinguished from the real religious ceremonies by the fact that it is open to women and uninitiated persons. But if these two sorts of collective manifestations are to be distinguished, they are, none the less, closely related. We shall have occasion elsewhere to come back to this relationship and to explain it.

699 Except, of course, in the case of the great bush-beating hunts.

700 “The peaceful monotony of this part of his life,” say Spencer and Gillen (Nor. Tr., p. 33).

701 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 683. He is speaking of the demonstrations which take place when an ambassador sent to a group of foreigners returns to camp with news of a favourable result. Cf. Brough Smyth, I, p. 138; Schulze, loc. cit., p. 222.

702 See Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 96 f.; Nor. Tr., p. 137; Brough Smyth, II, p. 319.—This ritual promiscuity is found especially in the initiation ceremonies (Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 267, 381; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 657), and in the totemic ceremonies (Nor. Tr., pp. 214, 298, 237). In these latter, the ordinary exogamic rules are violated. Sometimes among the Arunta, unions between father and daughter, mother and son, and brothers and sisters (that is in every case, relationship by blood) remain forbidden (Nat. Tr., pp. 96 f.).

703 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 535, 545. This is extremely common.

704 These women were Kingilli themselves, so these unions violated the exogamic rules.

705 Nor. Tr., p. 237.

706 Nor. Tr., p. 391. Other examples of this collective effervescence during the religious ceremonies will be found in Nat. Tr., pp. 244-246, 365-366, 374, 509-510 (this latter in connection with a funeral rite). Cf. Nor. Tr., pp. 213, 351.

707 Thus we see that this fraternity is the logical consequence of totemism, rather than its basis. Men have not imagined their duties towards the animals of the totemic species because they regarded them as kindred, but have imagined the kinship to explain the nature of the beliefs and rites of which they were the object. The animal was considered a relative of the man because it was a sacred being like the man, but it was not treated as a sacred being because it was regarded as a relative.

708 See below, Bk. III, ch i, § 3.

709 At the bottom of this conception there is a well-founded and persistent sentiment. Modern science also tends more and more to admit that the duality of man and nature does not exclude their unity, and that physical and moral forces, though distinct, are closely related. We undoubtedly have a different conception of this unity and relationship than the primitive, but beneath these different symbols, the truth affirmed by the two is the same.

710 We say that this derivation is sometimes indirect on account of the industrial methods which, in a large number of cases, seem to be derived from religion through the intermediacy of magic (see Hubert and Mauss, Théorie générale de la Magie, Année Sociol., VII, pp. 144 ff.); for, as we believe, magic forces are only a special form of religious forces. We shall have occasion to return to this point several times.

711 At least after he is once adult and fully initiated, for the initiation rites, introducing the young man to the social life, are a severe discipline in themselves.

712 Upon this particular aspect of primitive societies, see our Division du travail social, 3rd ed., pp. 123, 149, 173 ff.

713 We provisionally limit ourselves to this general indication: we shall return to this idea and give more explicit proof, when we speak of the rites (Bk. III).

714 On this point, see Achelis, Die Ekstase, Berlin, 1902, especially ch. i.

715 Cf. Mauss, Essai sur les variations saisonnières des sociétés eskimos, in Année Sociol., IX, p. 127.

716 Thus we see how erroneous those theories are which, like the geographical materialism of Ratzel (see especially his Politische Geographie), seek to derive all social life from its material foundation (either economic or territorial). They commit an error precisely similar to the one committed by Maudsley in individual psychology. Just as this latter reduced all the psychical life of the individual to a mere epiphenomenon of his physiological basis, they seek to reduce the whole psychical life of the group to its physical basis. But they forget that ideas are realities and forces, and that collective representations are forces even more powerful and active than individual representations. On this point, see our Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives, in the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, May, 1898.

717 See above, pp. 188 and 194.

718 Even the excreta have a religious character. See Preuss, Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst, especially ch. ii, entitled Der Zauber der Defäkation (Globus, LXXXVI, pp. 325 ff.).

719 This principle has passed from religion into magic: it is the totem ex parte of the alchemists.

720 On this point see Règles de la méthode sociologique, pp. 5 ff.

721 Procopius of Gaza, Commentarii in Isaiam, 496.

722 See Thévenot, Voyage au Levant, Paris, 1689, p. 638. The fact was still round in 1862.

723 Lacassagne, Les Tatouages, p. 10.

724 Lombroso, L’homme criminel, I, p. 292.

725 Lombroso, ibid., I, pp. 268, 285, 291 f.; Lacassagne, op. cit., p. 97.

726 See above, p. 127.

727 For the authority of the chiefs, see Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 10; Nor. Tr., p. 25; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 295 ff.

728 At least in Australia. In America, the population is more generally sedentary; but the American clan represents a relatively advanced form of organization.

729 To make sure of this, it is sufficient to look at the chart arranged by Thomas, Kinship and Marriage in Australia, p. 40. To appreciate this chart properly, it should be remembered that the author has extended, for a reason unknown to us, the system of totemic filiation in the paternal line clear to the western coast of Australia, though we have almost no information about the tribes of this region, which is, moreover, largely a desert.

730 The stars are often regarded, even by the Australians, as the land of souls and mythical personages, as will be established in the next chapter: that means that they pass as being a very different world from that of the living.

731 Op. cit., I, p. 4. Cf. Schulze, loc. cit., p. 243.

732 Of course it is to be understood that, as we have already pointed out (see above, p. 155), this choice was not made without a more or less formal agreement between the groups that each should take a different emblem from its neighbours.

733 The mental state studied in this paragraph is identical to the one called by Lévy-Bruhl the law of participation (Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, pp. 76 ff.). The following pages were written when this work appeared and we publish them without change; we confine ourselves to adding certain explanations showing in what we differ from M. Lévy-Bruhl in our understanding of the facts.

734 See above, p. 230.

735 Another cause has contributed much to this fusion; this is the extreme contagiousness of religious forces. They seize upon every object within their reach, whatever it may be. Thus a single religious force may animate the most diverse things which, by that very fact, become closely connected and classified within a single group. We shall return again to this contagiousness, when we shall show that it comes from the social origins of the idea of sacredness (Bk. III, ch. i, in fine).

736 Lévy-Bruhl, op. cit., pp. 77 ff.

737 Ibid., p. 79.

738 See above, p. 146.

739 This is the case with the Gnanji; see Nor. Tr., pp. 170, 546; cf. a similar case in Brough Smyth, II, p. 269.

740 Australian Aborigines, p. 51.

741 There certainly was a time when the Gnanji women had souls, for a large number of women’s souls still exist to-day. However, they never reincarnate themselves; since in this tribe the soul animating a new-born child is an old reincarnated soul, it follows from the fact that women’s souls do not reincarnate themselves, that women cannot have a soul. Moreover, it is possible to explain whence this absence of reincarnation comes. Filiation among the Gnanji, after having been uterine, is now in the paternal line: a mother no longer transmits her totem to her child. So the woman no longer has any descendants to perpetuate her; she is the finis familiæ suæ. To explain this situation, there are only two possible hypotheses; either women have no souls, or else they are destroyed after death. The Gnanji have adopted the former of these two explanations; certain peoples of Queensland have preferred the latter (see Roth, Superstition, Magic and Medicine, in N. Queensland Ethnog., No. 5, § 68).

742 “The children below four or five years of age have neither soul nor future life,” says Dawson. But the fact he thus relates is merely the absence of funeral rites for young children. We shall see the real meaning of this below.

743 Dawson, p. 51; Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 35; Eylmann, p. 188.

744 Nor. Tr., p. 542; Schürmann, The Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln, in Woods, p. 235.

745 This is the expression used by Dawson, p. 50.

746 Strehlow, I, p. 15, n. 1; Schulze, loc. cit., p. 246; this is the theme of the myth of the vampire.

747 Strehlow, I, p. 15; Schulze, p. 244; Dawson, p. 51. It is true that it is sometimes said that souls have nothing corporeal; according to certain testimony collected by Eylmann (p. 188), they are ohne Fleisch und Blut. But these radical negations leave us sceptical. The fact that offerings are not made to the souls of the dead in no way implies, as Roth thinks (Superstition, Magic, etc., § 65), that they do not eat.

748 Roth, ibid., § 65; Nor. Tr., p. 530. It sometimes happens that the soul emits odours (Roth, ibid., § 68).

749 Roth, ibid., § 67; Dawson, p. 51.

750 Roth, ibid., § 65.

751 Schürmann, Aborig. Tr. of Port Lincoln, in Woods, p. 235.

752 Parker, The Euahlayi, pp. 29, 35; Roth, ibid., §§ 65, 67, 68.

753 Roth, ibid., § 65; Strehlow, I, p. 15.

754 Strehlow, I, p. 14, n. 1.

755 Frazer, On Certain Burial Customs, as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul, in J.A.I., XV, p. 66.

756 This is the case with the Kaitish and the Unmatjera; see Nor. Tr., p. 506; and Nat. Tr., p. 512.

757 Roth, ibid., §§ 65, 66, 67, 68.

758 Roth, ibid., § 68; this says that when someone faints after a loss of blood, it is because the soul is gone. Cf. Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 38.

759 Parker, The Euahlayi, pp. 29, 35; Roth, ibid., § 65.

760 Strehlow, I, pp. 12, 14. In these passages he speaks of evil spirits which kill little children and eat their souls, livers and fat, or else their souls, livers and kidneys. The fact that the soul is thus put on the same plane as the different viscera and tissues and is made a food like them shows the close connection it has with them. Cf. Schulze, p. 245.

761 For example, among the peoples on the Pennefather River (Roth, ibid., § 68), there is a name for the soul residing in the heart (Ngai), another for the one in the placenta (Cho-i), and a third for the one which is confounded with the breath (Wanji). Among the Euahlayi, there are three or even four souls (Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 35).

762 See the description of the Urpmilchima rite among the Arunta (Nat. Tr., pp. 503 ff.).

763 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 497 and 508.

764 Nor. Tr., pp. 547, 548.

765 Ibid., pp. 506, 527 ff.

766 Meyer, The Encounter Bay Tribe, in Woods, p. 198.

767 Nor. Tr., pp. 551, 463; Nat. Tr., p. 553.

768 Nor. Tr., p. 540.

769 Among the Arunta and Loritja, for example (Strehlow, I, p. 15, n. 2; II, p. 77). During life, the soul is called gumna, and ltana after death. The ltana of Strehlow is identical with the ulthana of Spencer and Gillen (Nat. Tr., pp. 514 ff.). The same is true of the tribes on the Bloomfield River (Roth, Superstition, etc., §66).

770 Eylmann, p. 188.

771 Nat. Tr., pp. 524, 491, 496.

772 Nor. Tr., pp. 542, 504.

773 Mathews, Ethnol. Notes on the Aboriginal Tribes of N.S. Wales and Victoria, in Journal and Proc. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 287.

774 Strehlow, I, pp. 15 ff. Thus, according to Strehlow, the dead live in an island in the Arunta theory, but according to Spencer and Gillen, in a subterranean place. It is probable that the two myths coexist and are not the only ones. We shall see that even a third has been found. On this conception of an island of the dead, see Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 498; Schürmann, Aborig. Tr. of Port Lincoln, in Woods, p. 235; Eylmann, p. 189.

775 Schulze, p. 244.

776 Dawson, p. 51.

777 In these same tribes evident traces of a more ancient myth will be found, according to which the dead live in a subterranean place (Dawson, ibid.).

778 Taplin, The Narrinyeri, pp. 18 f.; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 473; Strehlow, I, p. 16.

779 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 498.

780 Strehlow, I, p. 16; Eylmann, p. 189; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 473.

781 These are the spirits of the ancestors of a special clan, the clan of a certain poisonous gland (Giftdrüsenmänner).

782 Sometimes the work of the missionaries is evident. Dawson speaks of a real hell opposed to paradise; but he too tends to regard this as a European importation.

783 Dorsey, XIth Rep., pp. 419-420, 422, 485. Cf. Marillier, La survivance de l’âme et l’idée de justice chez les peuples non-civilisés, Rapport de l’Ecole des Hautes Études, 1893.

784 They may be doubled temporarily, as we shall see in the next chapter: but these duplications add nothing to the number of the souls capable of reincarnation.

785 Strehlow, I, p. 2.

786 Nat. Tr., p. 73, n. 1

787 On this set of conceptions, see Nat. Tr., pp. 119, 123-127, 387 ff.; Nor. Tr., pp. 145-174. Among the Gnanji, it is not necessarily near the oknanikilla that the conception takes place. But they believe that each couple is accompanied in its wanderings over the continent by a swarm of souls of the husband’s totem. When the time comes, one of these souls enters the body of the wife and fertilizes it, wherever she may be (Nor. Tr., p. 169).

788 Nat. Tr., pp. 512 f.; cf. ch. x and xi.

789 Nat. Tr., p. 119.

790 Among the Kaitish (Nor. Tr., p. 154) and the Urabunna (Nor. Tr., p. 146).

791 This is the case among the Warramunga and the related tribes, the Walpari, Wulmala, Worgaia, Tjingilli (Nor. Tr., p. 161), and also the Umbaia and the Gnanji (ibid., p. 170).

792 Strehlow, I, pp. 15-16. For the Loritja, see Strehlow, p. 7.

793 Strehlow even goes so far as to say that sexual relations are not even thought to be a necessary condition or sort of preparation for conception (II, p. 52, n. 7). It is true that he adds a few lines below that the old men know perfectly well the connection which unites sexual intercourse and generation, and that as far as animals are concerned, the children themselves know it. This lessens the value of his first assertion a little.

794 In general, we employ the terminology of Spencer and Gillen rather than that of Strehlow because it is now consecrated by long usage.

795 Nat. Tr., pp. 124, 513.

796 I, p. 5. Ngarra means eternal, according to Strehlow. Among the Loritja, only rocks fulfil this function.

797 Strehlow translates it by Kinderkeime (children-germs). It is not true that Spencer and Gillen have ignored the myth of the ratapa and the customs connected with it. They explicitly mention it in Nat. Tr., pp. 336 ff. and 552. They noticed, at different points of the Arunta territory, the existence of rocks called Erathipa from which the spirit children, or the children’s souls, disengage themselves, to enter the bodies of women and fertilize them. According to Spencer and Gillen, Erathipa means child, though, as they add, it is rarely used in this sense in ordinary conversation (ibid., p. 338).

798 The Arunta are divided into four or eight matrimonial classes. The class of a child is determined by that of his father; inversely, that of the latter may be deduced from the former (see Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 70 ff.; Strehlow, I, pp. 6 ff.). It remains to be seen how the ratapa has a matrimonial class; we shall return to this point again.

799 Strehlow, II, p. 52. It happens sometimes, though rarely, that disputes arise over the nature of the child’s totem. Strehlow cites such a case (II, p. 53).

800 This is the same word as the namatwinna found in Spencer and Gillen (Nat. Tr., p. 541).

801 Strehlow, II, p. 53.

802 Strehlow, II, p. 56.

803 Mathews attributes a similar theory of conception to the Tjingilli (alias Chingalee) (Proc. Roy. Geogr. Trans. and Soc. Queensland, XXII (1907), pp. 75-76).

804 It sometimes happens that the ancestor who is believed to have thrown the namatuna shows himself to the woman in the form of an animal or a man; this is one more proof of the affinity of the ancestral soul for a material form.

805 Schulze, loc. cit., p. 237.

806 This results from the fact that the ratapa can incarnate itself only in the body of a woman belonging to the same matrimonial class as the mother of the mythical ancestor. So we cannot understand how Strehlow could say (I, p. 42, Anmerkung) that, except in one case, the myths do not attribute determined matrimonial classes to the Alcheringa ancestors. His own theory of conception proves the contrary (cf. II, pp. 53 ff.).

807 Strehlow, II, p. 58.

808 The difference between the two versions becomes still smaller and is reduced to almost nothing, if we observe that, when Spencer and Gillen tell us that the ancestral soul is incarnated in the woman, the expressions they use are not to be taken literally. It is not the whole soul which comes to fertilize the mother, but only an emanation from this soul. In fact, according to their own statement, a soul equal or even superior in power to the one that is incarnated continues to live in the nanja tree or rock (see Nat. Tr., p. 514); we shall have occasion to come back to this point again (cf. below, p. 275).

809 II, pp. 76, 81. According to Spencer and Gillen, the churinga is not the soul of the ancestor, but the object in which his soul resides. At bottom, these two mythological interpretations are identical, and it is easy to see how one has been able to pass into the other: the body is the place where the soul resides.

810 Strehlow, I, p. 4.

811 Strehlow, I, pp. 53 f. In these stories, the ancestor begins by introducing himself into the body of the woman and causing there the troubles characteristic of pregnancy. Then he goes out, and only then does he leave his namatuna.

812 Strehlow, II, p. 76.

813 Ibid., p. 81. This is the word for word translation of the terms employed, as Strehlow gives them: Dies du Körper bist; dies du der nämliche. In the myth, a civilizing hero, Mangarkunjerkunja, says as he presents to each man the churinga of his ancestor: “You are born of this churinga” (ibid., p. 76).

814 Strehlow, II, p. 76.

815 Strehlow, ibid.

816 At bottom, the only real difference between Strehlow and Spencer and Gillen is the following one. For these latter, the soul of the individual, after death, returns to the nanja tree, where it is again confounded with the ancestor’s soul (Nat. Tr., p. 513); for Strehlow, it goes to the isle of the dead, where it is finally annihilated. In neither myth does it survive individually. We are not going to seek the cause of this divergence. It is possible that there has been an error of observation on the part of Spencer and Gillen, who do not speak of the isle of the dead. It is also possible that the myth is not the same among the eastern Arunta, whom Spencer and Gillen observed particularly, as in the other parts of the tribe.

817 Strehlow, II, p. 51.

818 Ibid., II, p. 56.

819 Ibid., I, pp. 3-4.

820 Ibid., II, p. 61.

821 See above, p. 183.

822 Strehlow, II, p. 57; I, p. 2.

823 Strehlow, II, p. 57.

824 Roth, Superstition, Magic, etc., § 74.

825 In other words, the totemic species is made up of the group of ancestors and the mythological species much more than of the regular animal or vegetable species.

826 See above, p. 254.

827 Strehlow, II, p. 76.

828 Strehlow, ibid.

829 Strehlow, II, pp. 57, 60, 61. Strehlow calls the list of totems the list of ratapa.

830 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 475 ff.

831 The Manners and Customs of the Dieyerie Tribe of Australian Aborigines, in Curr, II, p. 47.

832 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 482.

833 Ibid., p. 487.

834 Taplin, Folk-Lore, Customs, Manners, etc., of the South Australian Aborig., p. 88.

835 The clan of each ancestor has its special camp underground; this camp is the miyur.

836 Mathews, in Jour. of Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 293. He points out the same belief among other tribes of Victoria (ibid., p. 197).

837 Mathews, ibid., p. 349.

838 J. Bishop, Die Niol-Niol, in Anthropos, III, p. 35.

839 Roth, Superstition, etc., § 68; cf. § 69a, gives a similar case from among the natives on the Proserpine River. To simplify the description, we have left aside the complications due to differences of sex. The souls of daughters are made out of the choi of their mother, though these share with their brothers the ngai of their father. This peculiarity, coming perhaps from two systems of filiation which have been in use successively, has nothing to do with the principle of the perpetuity of the soul.

840 Ibid., p. 16.

841 Die Tlinkit-Indianer, p. 282.

842 Swanton, Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida, pp. 117 ff.

843 Boas, Sixth Rep. of the Comm. on the N.W. Tribes of Canada, p. 59.

844 Lafitau, Mœurs des sauvages Amériquains, II, p. 434; Petitot, Monographie des Dénè-Dindjié, p. 59.

845 See above, pp. 134 ff.

846 See above, p. 137.

847 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 147; cf. ibid., p. 769.

848 Strehlow (I, p. 15, n. 2) and Schulze (loc. cit., p. 246) speak of the soul, as Howitt here speaks of the totem, as leaving the body to go to eat another soul. Likewise, as we have seen above, the altjira or maternal totem shows itself in dreams, just as a soul or spirit does.

849 Fison and Howitt, Kurnai and Kamilaroi, p. 280.

850 Globus, Vol. CXI, p. 289. In spite of the objections of Leonhardi, Strehlow maintains his affirmations on this point (see Strehlow, III, p. xi). Leonhardi finds a contradiction between this assertion and the theory according to which the ratapa emanate from trees, rocks or churinga. But the totemic animal incarnates the totem just as much as the nanja-tree or rock does, so they may fulfil the same function. The two things are mythological equivalents.

851 Notes on the West Coastal Tribes of the Northern Territory of S. Australia, in Trans. of the Roy. Soc. of S. Aust., XXXI (1907), p. 4. Cf. Man, 1909, No. 86.

852 Among the Wakelbura, where, according to Curr and Howitt, each matrimonial class has its own totems, the animal shows the class (see Curr, III, p. 28); among the Buandik, it reveals the clan (Mrs. James S. Smith, The Buandik Tribes of S. Australian Aborigines, p, 128). Cf. Howitt, On Some Australian Beliefs, in J.A.I., XIII, p. 191; XIV, p. 362; Thomas, An American View of Totemism, in Man, 1902, No. 85; Mathews, Journ. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, pp. 347-348; Brough Smyth, I, p. 110; Nor. Tr., p. 513.

853 Roth, Superstition, etc., § 83. This is probably a form of sexual totemism.

854 Prinz zu Wied, Reise in das innere Nord-Amerika, II, p. 190.

855 K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Bräsiliens, 1894, pp. 511, 512.

856 See Frazer, Golden Bough², I, pp. 250, 253, 256, 257, 258.

857 Third Rep., pp. 229, 233.

858 Indian Tribes, IV, p. 86.

859 For example, among the Batta of Sumatra (see Golden Bough², III, p. 420), in Melanesia (Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 178), in the Malay Archipelago (Tylor, Remarks on Totemism, in J.A.I., New Series, I, p. 147). It is to be remarked that the cases where the soul clearly presents itself after death in an animal form all come from the societies where totemism is more or less perverted. This is because the idea of the soul is necessarily ambiguous wherever the totemic beliefs are relatively pure, for totemism implies that it participate in the two kingdoms at the same time. So it cannot become either one or the other exclusively, but takes one aspect or the other, according to the circumstances. As totemism develops, this ambiguity becomes less necessary, while at the same time, spirits more actively demand attention. Then the marked affinities of the soul for the animal kingdom are manifested, especially after it is freed from the human body.

860 See above, p. 170. On the generality of the doctrine of metempsychosis, see Tylor, II, pp. 8 ff.

861 Even if we believe that religious and moral representations constitute the essential elements of the idea of the soul, still we do not mean to say that they are the only ones. Around this central nucleus are grouped other states of consciousness having this same character, though to a slighter degree. This is the case with all the superior forms of the intellectual life, owing to the special price and dignity attributed to them by society. When we devote our lives to science or art, we feel that we are moving in a circle of things that are above bodily sensations, as we shall have occasion to show more precisely in our conclusion. This is why the highest functions of the intelligence have always been considered specific manifestations of the soul. But they would probably not have been enough to establish the idea of it.

862 F. Tregear, The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary, pp. 203-205.

863 This is the thesis of Preuss in his articles in the Globus which we have cited several times. It seems that M. Lévy-Bruhl also tends towards this conception (see his Fonctions mentales, etc., pp. 92-93).

864 On this point, see our Suicide, pp. 233 ff.

865 It may be objected perhaps that unity is the characteristic of the personality, while the soul has always been conceived as multiple, and as capable of dividing and subdividing itself almost to infinity. But we know to-day that the unity of the person is also made up of parts and that it, too, is capable of dividing and decomposing. Yet the notion of personality does not vanish because of the fact that we no longer think of it as a metaphysical and indivisible atom. It is the same with the popular conceptions of personality which find their expression in the idea of the soul. These show that men have always felt that the human personality does not have that absolute unity attributed to it by certain metaphysicians.

866 For all this, we do not deny the importance of the individual factor: this is explained from our point of view just as easily as its contrary. If the essential element of the personality is the social part of us, on the other hand there can be no social life unless distinct individuals are associated, and this is richer the more numerous and different from each other they are. So the individual factor is a condition of the impersonal factor. And the contrary is no less true, for society itself is an important source of individual differences (see our Division du travail social, 3rd. ed., pp. 267 ff.).

867 Roth, Superstition, Magic, etc., §§ 65, 68; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 514, 516.

868 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 521, 515; Dawson, Austral. Aborig., p. 58; Roth, op. cit., § 67.

869 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 517.

870 Strehlow, II, p. 76 and n. 1; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 514, 516.

871 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 513.

872 On this question, see Negrioli, Dei Genii presso i Romani; the articles Daimon and Genius in the Dict. of Antiq.; Preller, Romische Mythologie, II, pp. 195 ff.

873 Negrioli, ibid., p. 4.

874 Ibid., p. 8.

875 Ibid., p. 7.

876 Ibid., p. 11. Cf. Samter, Der Ursprung der Larencultus, in Archiv f. Religions-wissenschaft, 1907, pp. 368-393.

877 Schulze, loc. cit., p. 237.

878 Strehlow, I, p. 5. Cf. Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 133; Gason, in Curr, II, p. 69.

879 See the case of a Mura-mura who is considered the spirit of certain hot springs, in Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 482.

880 Nor. Tr., pp. 313 f.; Mathews, Journ. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 351. Among the Dieri there is also a Mura-mura whose function is to produce rain (Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 798 f.).

881 Roth. Superstition, etc., § 67. Cf. Dawson, p. 59.

882 Strehlow, I, pp. 2 ff.

883 See above, p. 249.

884 Nor. Tr., ch. vii.

885 Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 277.

886 Strehlow, I, p. 5.

887 It is true that some nanja-trees and rocks are not situated around the ertnatulunga; they are scattered over different parts of the tribal territory. It is said that these are places where an isolated ancestor disappeared into the ground, lost a member, let some blood flow, or lost a churinga which was transformed into a tree or rock. But these totemic sites have only a secondary importance; Strehlow calls them kleinere Totemplätze (I, pp. 4-5). So it may be that they have taken this character only by analogy with the principal totemic centres. The trees and rocks which, for some reason or other, remind one of those found in the neighbourhood of an ertnatulunga, inspire analogous sentiments, so the myth which was formed in regard to the latter was extended to the former.

888 Nat. Tr., p. 139.

889 Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 21. The tree serving for this use is generally one of those figuring among the sub-totems of the individual. As a reason for this choice, they say that as it is of the same family as the individual, it should be better disposed to giving him aid (ibid., p. 29).

890 Ibid., p. 36.

891 Strehlow, II, p. 81.

892 Parker, op. cit., p. 21.

893 Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 249-253.

894 Turner, Samoa, p. 17.

895 These are the very words used by Codrington (p. 251).

896 This close connection between the soul, the guardian genius and the moral conscience of the individual is especially apparent among certain peoples of Indonesia. “One of the seven souls of the Tobabatak is buried with the placenta; though preferring to live in this place, it may leave it to warn the individual or to manifest its approbation when he does well. So in one sense, it plays the rôle of a moral conscience. However, its communications are not confined to the domain of moral facts. It is called the younger brother of the soul, as the placenta is called the younger brother of the child.... In war, it inspires the man with courage to march against the enemy” (Warneck, Der bataksche Ahnen und Geistercult, in Allg. Missionszeitschrift, Berlin, 1904. p. 10. Cf. Kruijt, Het Animisme in den indischen Archipel, p. 25).

897 It still remains to be investigated how it comes that after a certain moment in evolution, this duplication of the soul was made in the form of an individual totem rather than of a protecting ancestor. Perhaps this question has an ethnological rather than a sociological interest. However, the manner in which this substitution was probably effected may be represented as follows.
The individual totem commenced by playing a merely complimentary rôle. Those individuals who wished to acquire powers superior to those possessed by everybody, did not and could not content themselves with the mere protection of the ancestor; so they began to look for another assistant of the same sort. Thus it comes about that among the Euahlayi, the magicians are the only ones who have or who can procure individual totems. As each one has a collective totem in addition, he finds himself having many souls. But there is nothing surprising in this plurality of souls: it is the condition of a superior power.
But when collective totemism once begins to lose ground, and when the conception of the protecting ancestor consequently begins to grow dim in the mind, another method must be found for representing the double nature of the soul, which is still felt. The resulting idea was that, outside of the individual soul, there was another, charged with watching over the first one. Since this protecting power was no longer demonstrated by the very fact of birth, men found it natural to employ, for its discovery, means analogous to those used by magicians to enter into communion with the forces of whose aid they thus assured themselves.

898 For example, see Strehlow, II, p. 82.

899 Wyatt, Adelaide and Encounter Bay Tribes, in Woods, p. 168.

900 Taplin, The Narrinyeri, pp. 62 f.; Roth, Superstition, etc., § 116; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 356, 358; Strehlow, pp. 11-12.

901 Strehlow, I, pp. 13-14; Dawson, p. 49.

902 Strehlow, I, pp. 11-14; Eylmann, pp. 182, 185; Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 211; Schürmann, The Aborig. Tr. of Port Lincoln, in Woods, p. 239.

903 Eylmann, p. 182.

904 Mathews, Journ. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 345; Fison and Howitt, Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 467; Strehlow, I, p. 11.

905 Nat. Tr., pp. 390-391. Strehlow calls these evil spirits Erintja; but this word is evidently equivalent to Oruncha. Yet there is a difference in the ways the two are presented to us. According to Spencer and Gillen, the Oruncha are malicious rather than evil; they even say (p. 328) that the Arunta know no necessarily evil spirits. On the contrary, the regular business of Strehlow’s Erintja is to do evil. Judging from certain myths given by Spencer and Gillen (Nat. Tr., p. 390), they seem to have touched up the figures of the Oruncha a little: these were originally ogres (ibid., p. 331).

906 Roth, Superstition, etc., § 115; Eylmann, p. 190.

907 Nat. Tr., pp. 390 f.

908 Ibid., p. 551.

909 Ibid., pp. 326 f.

910 Strehlow, I, p. 14. When there are twins, the first one is believed to have been conceived in this manner.

911 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 327.

912 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 358, 381, 385; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 334; Nor. Tr., pp. 501, 530.

913 As the magician can either cause or cure sickness, we sometimes find, besides these magical spirits whose function is to do evil, others who forestall or neutralize the evil influence of the former. Cases of this sort will be found in Nor. Tr., pp. 501-502. The fact that the latter are magic just as much as the former is well shown by the fact that the two have the same name, among the Arunta. So they are different aspects of a single magic power.

914 Strehlow, I, p. 9. Putiaputia is not the only personage of this sort of whom the Arunta myths speak: certain portions of the tribe give a different name to the hero to whom the same invention is ascribed. We must not forget that the extent of the territory occupied by the Arunta prevents their mythology from being completely homogeneous.

915 Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 493.

916 Ibid., p. 498.

917 Ibid., pp. 498 f.

918 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 135.

919 Ibid., pp. 476 ff.

920 Strehlow, I, pp. 6-8. The work of Mangarkunjerkunja must be taken up again later among other heroes; for, according to a belief that is not confined to the Arunta, a time came when men forgot the teaching of their first initiators and became corrupt.

921 This is the case, for example, of Atnatu (Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 153) and the Witurna (Nor. Tr., p. 498), If Tendun did not establish these rites, it is he who is charged with the direction of their celebration (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 670).

922 Nor. Tr., p. 499.

923 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 493; Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 197 and 247; Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 492.

924 For example, see Nor. Tr., p. 499.

925 Nor. Tr., pp. 338, 347, 499.

926 It is true that Spencer and Gillen maintain that these mythical beings play no moral rôle (Nor. Tr., p. 493); but this is because they give too narrow a meaning to the word. Religious duties are duties: so the fact of looking after the manner in which these are observed concerns morals, especially because all morals have a religious character at this period.

927 The fact was observed as early as 1845 by Eyre, Journals, etc., II, p. 362, and, before Eyre, by Henderson, Observations on the Colonies of N.S. Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, p. 147.

928 Nat. Tr., pp. 488-508.

929 Among the Kulin, Wotjobaluk and Woëworung (Victoria).

930 Among the Yuin, Ngarrigo and Wolgal (New South Wales).

931 Among the Kamilaroi and Euahlayi (northern part of New South Wales); and more to the centre, in the same province, among the Wonghibon and the Wiradjuri.

932 Among the Wiimbaio and the tribes on the lower Murray (Ridley, Kamilaroi, p. 137; Brough Smyth, I, pp. 423, n., 431).

933 Among the tribes on the Herbert River (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 498).

934 Among the Kurnai.

935 Taplin, p. 55; Eylmann, p. 182.

936 It is undoubtedly to this supreme Mura-mura that Gason makes allusion in the passage already cited (Curr, II, p. 55).

937 Nat. Tr., p. 246.

938 Between Baiame, Bunjil and Daramulun on the one hand, and Altjira on the other, there is the difference that the latter is completely foreign to all that concerns humanity; he did not make man and does not concern himself with what they do. The Arunta have neither love nor fear for him. But when this conception is carefully observed and analysed, it is hard to admit that it is primitive; for if the Altjira plays no rôle, explains nothing, serves for nothing, what made the Arunta imagine him? Perhaps it is necessary to consider him as a sort of Baiame who has lost his former prestige, as an ancient god whose memory is fading away. Perhaps, also, Strehlow has badly interpreted the testimony he has gathered. According to Eylmann, who, it is to be admitted, is neither a very competent nor a very sure observer, Altjira made men (op. cit., p. 134). Moreover, among the Loritja, the corresponding personage, Tukura, is believed to celebrate the initiation ceremonies himself.

939 For Bunjil, see Brough Smyth, I, p. 417; for Baiame, see Ridley, Kamilaroi, p. 136; for Daramulun, see Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 495.

940 On the composition of Bunjil’s family, for example, see Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 128, 129, 489, 491; Brough Smyth, I, pp. 417, 423; for Baiame’s, see L. Parker, The Euahlayi, pp. 7, 66, 103; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 502, 585, 407; for Nurunderi’s, Taplin, The Narrinyeri, pp. 57 f. Of course, there are all sorts of variations in the ways in which the families of these great gods are conceived. The personage who is a brother here, is a son there. The number and names of the wives vary with the locality.

941 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 128.

942 Brough Smyth, I, pp. 430, 431.

943 Ibid., I, p. 432, n.

944 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 498, 538; Mathews, Jour. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 343; Ridley, p. 136.

945 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 538; Taplin, The Narrinyeri, pp. 57-58.

946 L. Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 8.

947 Brough Smyth, I, p. 424.

948 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 492.

949 According to certain myths, he made men but not women; this is related of Bunjil. But then, the origin of women is attributed to his son-brother, Pallyan (Brough Smyth, I, pp. 417 and 423).

950 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 489, 492; Mathews, Journ. of the Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 340.

951 L. Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 7; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 630.

952 Ridley, Kamilaroi, p. 136; L. Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 114.

953 L. Parker, More Austr. Leg. Tales, pp. 84-89, 90-91.

954 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 495, 498, 543, 563, 564; Brough Smyth, I, p. 429; L. Parker, The Euahlayi, pp. 79.

955 Ridley, p. 137.

956 L. Parker, The Euahlayi, pp. 90-91.

957 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 495; Taplin, The Narrinyeri, p. 58.

958 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 538, 543, 553, 555, 556; Mathews, loc. cit., p. 318; L. Parker, The Euahlayi, pp. 6, 79, 80.

959 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 498, 528.

960 Howitt, ibid., p. 493; L. Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 76.

961 L. Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 76; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 493, 612.

962 Ridley, Kamilaroi, p. 153; L. Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 67; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 585; Mathews, loc. cit., p. 343. In opposition to Baiame, Daramulun is sometimes presented as a necessarily evil spirit (L. Parker, loc. cit.; Ridley, in Brough Smyth, II, p. 285).

963 J.A.I., XXI, pp. 292 ff.

964 The Making of Religion, pp. 187-293.

965 Lang, ibid., p. 331. The author confines himself to stating that the hypothesis of St. Paul does not appear to him “the most unsatisfactory.”

966 The thesis of Lang has been taken up again by Father Schmidt in the Anthropos (1908-1909). Replying to Sydney Hartland, who had criticized Lang’s theory in an article entitled The “High Gods” of Australia, in Folk-Lore (Vol. IX, pp. 290 ff.), Father Schmidt undertook to show that Baiame, Bunjil, etc., are eternal gods, creators, omnipotent, omniscient and guardians of the moral order. We are not going to enter into this discussion, which seems to have neither interest nor importance. If these different adjectives are given a relative sense, in harmony with the Australian mind, we are quite ready to accept them, and have even used them ourselves. From this point of view, omnipotent means having more power than the other sacred beings; omniscient, seeing things that escape the vulgar and even the greatest magicians; guardian of the moral order, one causing the rules of Australian morality to be respected, howsoever much these may differ from our own. But if they want to give these words meanings which only a spiritualistic Christian could attach to them, it seems useless to discuss an opinion so contrary to the principles of the historical method.

967 On this question, see N. W. Thomas, Baiame and Bell-bird—A Note on Australian Religion, in Man, 1905, No. 28. Cf. Lang, Magic and Religion, p. 25. Waitz had already upheld the original character of this conception in his Anthropologie d. Naturvölker, pp. 796-798.

968 Dawson, p. 49; Meyer, Encounter Bay Tribe, in Woods, pp. 205, 206; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 481, 491, 492, 494; Ridley, Kamilaroi, p. 136.

969 Taplin, The Narrinyeri, pp. 55-56.

970 L. Parker, More Austr. Leg. Tales, p. 94.

971 Brough Smyth, I, pp. 425-427.

972 Taplin, ibid., p. 60.

973 Taplin, ibid., p. 61.

974 “The world was created by beings called Nuralie; these beings, who had already long existed, had the forms of crows or of eagle-hawks” (Brough Smyth, I, pp. 423-424).

975 “Bayamee,” says Mrs. Parker, “is for the Euahlayi what the Alcheringa is for the Arunta” (The Euahlayi, p. 6).

976 See above, pp. 257 f.

977 In another myth, reported by Spencer and Gillen, a wholly analogous rôle is filled by two personages living in heaven, named Ungambikula (Nat. Tr., pp. 388 ff.).

978 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 493.

979 Parker, The Euahlayi, pp. 62-66, 67. This is because the great god is connected with the bull-roarer, which is identified with the thunder; for the roaring of this ritual instrument is connected with the rolling of thunder.

980 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 135. The word meaning totem is written thundung by Howitt.

981 Strehlow, I, pp. 1-2 and II, p. 59. It will be remembered that, among the Arunta, the maternal totem was quite probably the real totem at first.

982 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 555.

983 Ibid., pp. 546, 560.

984 Ridley, Kamilaroi, pp. 136, 156. He is represented in this form during the initiation rites of the Kamilaroi. According to another legend, he is a black swan (L. Parker, More Aust. Leg. Tales, p. 94).

985 Strehlow, I, p. 1.

986 Brough Smyth, I, pp. 423-424.

987 Nat. Tr., p. 492.

988 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 128.

989 Brough Smyth, I, pp. 417-423.

990 See above, p. 108.

991 There are phratries bearing the names Kilpara (crow) and Mukwara. This is the explanation of the myth itself, which is reported by Brough Smyth (I, pp. 423-424).

992 Brough Smyth, I, pp. 425-427. Cf. Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 486. In this case, Karween is identified with the blue heron.

993 Brough Smyth, I, p. 423.

994 Ridley, Kamilaroi, p. 136; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 585; Mathews, J. of R. S. of N.S. Wales, XXVIII (1894), p. 111.

995 See above, p. 145. Cf. Father Schmidt, The Origin of the Idea of God, in Anthropos, 1909.

996 Op. cit., p. 7. Among these same people, the principal wife of Baiame is also represented as the mother of all the totems, without belonging to any totem herself (ibid., pp. 7, 79).

997 See Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 511 f., 513, 602 ff.; Mathews, J. of R.S. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 270. They invite to these feasts not only the tribes with whom a regular connubium is established, but also those with whom there are quarrels to be arranged; the vendetta, half-ceremonial and half-serious, take place on these occasions.

998 See above, p. 155.

999 There is one form of ritual especially which we leave completely aside; this is the oral ritual which must be studied in a special volume of the Collection de l’Année Sociologique.

1000 See the article Taboo in the Encyclopædia Britannica, written by Frazer.

1001 Facts prove the reality of this inconvenience. There is no lack of writers who, putting their trust in the word, have believed that the institution thus designated was peculiar to primitive peoples in general, or even to the Polynesians (see Réville, Religion des peuples primitifs, II, p. 55; Richard, La Femme dans l’histoire, p. 435).

1002 See above, p. 43.

1003 This is not saying that there is a radical break of continuity between the religious and the magic interdictions: on the contrary, it is one whose true nature is not decided. There are interdicts of folk-lore of which it is hard to say whether they are religious or magic. But their distinction is necessary, for we believe that the magic interdicts cannot be understood except as a function of the religious ones.

1004 See above, p. 149.

1005 Many of the interdictions between sacred things can be traced back, we think, to those between the sacred and the profane. This is the case with the interdicts of age or rank. For example, in Australia, there are sacred foods which are reserved for the initiated. But these foods are not all sacred to the same degree; there is a hierarchy among them. Nor are the initiated all equal. They do not enjoy all their religious rights from the first, but only enter step by step into the domain of religious things. They must pass through a whole series of ranks which are conferred upon them one after another, after special trials and ceremonies; it requires months and sometimes even years to reach the highest rank. Now special foods are assigned to each of these ranks; the men of the lower ranks may not touch the foods which rightfully belong to the men of the superior ones (see Mathews, Ethnol. Notes, etc., loc. cit. pp. 262 ff.; Parker, The Euahlayi, p. 23; Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., pp. 611 ff.; Nat. Tr., pp. 470 ff.). So the more sacred repels the less sacred; but this is because the second is profane in relation to the first. In fine, all the interdictions arrange themselves in two classes: the interdictions between the sacred and the profane and the purely sacred and the impurely sacred.

1006 See above, p. 137.

1007 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 463.

1008 Nat. Tr., p. 538; Nor. Tr., p. 640.

1009 Nor. Tr., p. 531.

1010 Nor. Tr., pp. 518 f.; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 449.

1011 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 498; Schulze, loc. cit., p. 231.

1012 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 499.

1013 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 451.

1014 If the alimentary interdictions which concern the totemic plant or vegetable are the most important, they are far from being the only ones. We have seen that there are foods which are forbidden to the non-initiated because they are sacred; now very different causes may confer this character. For example, as we shall presently see, the birds which are seen on the tops of trees are reputed to be sacred, because they are neighbours to the great god who lives in heaven. Thus, it is possible that for different reasons the flesh of certain animals has been specially reserved for the old men and that consequently it has seemed to partake of the sacred character recognized in these latter.

1015 See Frazer, Totemism, p. 7.

1016 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 674.—There is one interdiction of contact of which we say nothing because it is very hard to determine its exact nature: this is sexual contact. There are religious periods when a man cannot have commerce with a woman (Nor. Tr., pp. 293, 295; Nat. Tr., p. 397). Is this because the woman is profane or because the sexual act is dreaded? This question cannot be decided in passing. We set it aside along with all that concerns conjugal and sexual rites. It is too closely connected with the problems of marriage and the family to be separated from them.

1017 Nat. Tr., p. 134; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 354.

1018 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 624.

1019 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 572.

1020 Ibid., p. 661.

1021 Nat. Tr., p. 386; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 655, 665.

1022 Among the Wiimbaio (Howitt, ibid., p. 451).

1023 Howitt, ibid., pp. 624, 661, 663, 667; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 221, 382 ff.; Nor. Tr., pp. 335, 344, 353, 369.

1024 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 221, 262, 288, 303, 378, 380.

1025 Ibid., p. 302.

1026 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 581.

1027 Nor. Tr., p. 227.

1028 See above, p. 288.

1029 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 498; Nor. Tr., p. 526; Taplin, Narrinyeri, p. 19.

1030 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 466, 469 ff.

1031 Wyatt, Adelaide and Encounter Bay Tribes, in Woods, p. 165.

1032 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 470.

1033 Ibid., p. 657; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 139; Nor. Tr., pp. 580 ff.

1034 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 537.

1035 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 544, 597, 614, 620.

1036 For example, the hair belt which he ordinarily wears (Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 171).

1037 Ibid., p. 624 ff.

1038 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 556.

1039 Ibid., p. 587.

1040 This act takes on a sacred character, it is true, when the elements eaten are sacred. But in itself, the act is so very profane that eating a sacred food always constitutes a profanation. The profanation may be permitted or even ordered, but, as we shall see below, only on condition that rites attenuating or expiating it precede or accompany it. The existence of these rites shows that, by itself, the sacred thing should not be eaten.

1041 Nor. Tr., p. 263.

1042 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 171.

1043 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 674. Perhaps the rule against talking during the great religious solemnities is due to the same cause. Men speak, and especially in a high voice, during ordinary life; then, in the religious life they ought to keep still or talk in a low voice. This same consideration is not foreign to the alimentary interdictions (see above, p. 128).

1044 Nor. Tr., p. 33.

1045 Since there is a sacred principle, the soul, within each man, from the very first, the individual is surrounded by interdicts, the original form of the moral interdicts which isolate and protect the human person to-day. Thus the corpse of his victim is considered dangerous for a murderer (Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 492), and is taboo for him. Now the interdicts having this origin are frequently used by individuals as a means of withdrawing certain things from common use and thus establishing a property right over them. “When a man goes away from the camp, leaving his arms and food there,” says Roth, speaking of the tribes on the Palmer River (North Queensland), “if he urinates near the objects he leaves, they become tami (equivalent to taboo) and he may be sure of finding them intact on his return” (North Queensland Ethnography, in Records of the Australian Museum, Vol. VII, No. 2, p. 75). This is because the urine, like the blood, is believed to contain some of the sacred force which is personal to the individual. So it keeps strangers at a distance. For the same reasons, the spoken word may also serve as a vehicle for these same influences; that is how it becomes possible to prevent access to an object by a mere verbal declaration. This power of making interdicts varies with different individuals; it is greater as their character is more sacred. Men have this privilege almost to the exclusion of women (Roth cites one single case of a taboo imposed by women); it is at its maximum with the chiefs and old men, who use it to monopolize whatever things they find it convenient to (Roth, ibid., p. 77). Thus the religious interdict becomes a right of property and an administrative rule.

1046 See below, this book, ch. ii.

1047 See above, p. 10.

1048 See above, p. 219.

1049 See Hubert and Mauss, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, in Mélanges d’histoire des religions, pp. 22 ff.

1050 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 560, 657, 659, 661. Even the shadow of a woman must not fall upon him (ibid., p. 633). Whatever he has touched must not be touched by a woman (ibid., p. 621).

1051 Ibid., pp. 561, 563, 670 f.; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 223; Nor. Tr., pp. 340, 342.

1052 The word Jeraeil, for example, among the Kurnai, or Kuringal among the Yuin and Wolgal (Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 518, 617).

1053 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 348.

1054 Howitt, p. 561.

1055 Howitt, pp. 633, 538, 560.

1056 Ibid., p. 674; Parker, Euahlayi, p. 75.

1057 Ridley, Kamilaroi, p. 154.

1058 Howitt, p. 563.

1059 Ibid., p. 611.

1060 Ibid., pp. 549, 674.

1061 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 580, 596, 604, 668, 670; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 223, 351.

1062 Howitt, p. 557.

1063 Ibid., p. 604; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 351.

1064 Howitt, p. 611.

1065 Howitt, p. 589.

1066 One may compare these ascetic practices with those used at the initiation of a magician. Just like the young neophyte, the apprentice magician is submitted to a multitude of interdictions, the observation of which contributes to his acquisition of his specific powers (see L’Origine des pouvoirs magiques, in Hubert and Mauss, Mélanges d’histoire des religions, pp. 171, 173, 176). The same is true for the husband and wife on the day before and the day after the wedding (taboos of the betrothed and newly married); this is because marriage also implies a grave change of condition. We limit ourselves to mentioning these facts summarily, without stopping over them; for the first concern magic, which is not our subject, and the second have to do with that system of juridico-religious rules which relates to the commerce of the sexes, the study of which will be possible only in conjunction with the other precepts of primitive conjugal morality.

1067 It is true that Preuss interprets these facts by saying that suffering is a way of increasing a man’s magic force (die menschliche Zauberkraft); from this expression, one might believe that suffering is a magic rite, not a religious one. But as we have already pointed out, Preuss gives the name magic, without great precision, to all anonymous and impersonal forces, whether they belong to magic or religion. Of course, there are tortures which are used to make magicians; but many of those which we have described are a part of the real religious ceremonies, and, consequently, it is the religious state of the individuals which they modify.

1068 Preuss, Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst, in Globus, LXXXVIII, pp. 309-400. Under this same rubric Preuss classes a great number of incongruous rites, for example, effusions of blood which act in virtue of the positive qualities attributed to blood and not because of the suffering which they imply. We retain only those in which suffering is an essential element of the rite and the cause of its efficacy.

1069 Nor. Tr., pp. 331 f.

1070 Ibid., p. 335. A similar practice will be found among the Dieri (Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 658 ff.).

1071 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 214 ff.—From this example we see that the rites of initiation sometimes have all the characteristics of hazing. In fact, hazing is a real social institution which arises spontaneously every time that two groups, inequal in their moral and social situation, come into intimate contact. In this case, the one considering itself superior to the other resists the intrusion of the new-comers; it reacts against them is such a way as to make them aware of the superiority it feels. This reaction, which is produced automatically and which takes the form of more or less grave cruelties quite naturally, is also destined to shape the individuals for their new existence and assimilate them into their new environment. So it is a sort of initiation. Thus it is explained how the initiation, on its side, takes the form of hazing. It is because the group of old men is superior in religious and moral dignity to that of the young men, and yet the first must assimilate the second. So all the conditions for hazing are given.

1072 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 372.

1073 Ibid., p. 335.

1074 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 675.

1075 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 569, 604.

1076 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 251; Nor. Tr., 341, 352.

1077 Among the Warramunga, the operation must be made by persons favoured with beautiful hair.

1078 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 675; this concerns the tribes on the lower Darling.

1079 Eylmann, op. cit., p. 212.

1080 Ibid.

1081 References on this question will be found in our memoir on La Prohibition de l’incest et ses origines (Année Sociol., I, pp. 1 ff.), and Crawley, The Mystic Rose, pp. 37 ff.

1082 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 133.

1083 See above, p. 121.

1084 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 134 f.; Strehlow, I, p. 78.

1085 Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., pp. 167, 299.

1086 In addition to the ascetic rites of which we have spoken, there are some positive ones whose object is to charge, or, as Howitt says, to saturate the initiate with religiousness (Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 535). It is true that instead of religiousness, Howitt speaks of magic powers, but as we know, for the majority of the ethnologists, this word merely signifies religious virtues of an impersonal nature.

1087 Howitt, ibid., pp. 674 f.

1088 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 454. Cf. Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 561.

1089 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 557.

1090 Ibid., p. 560.

1091 See above, pp. 303, 306. Cf. Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 498; Nor. Tr., pp. 506, 507, 518 f., 526; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 449, 461, 469; Mathews, in J. of R.S. of N.S. Wales, XXXVIII, p. 274; Schulze, loc. cit., p. 231; Wyatt, Adelaide and Encounter Bay Tribes, in Woods, pp. 165, 198.

1092 Australian Aborigines, p. 42.

1093 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 470-471.

1094 On this question, see Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 152 ff., 446, 481; Frazer, art. Taboo in Encyc. Brit., Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 59 f.; Crawley, Mystic Rose, ch. ii-ix; Van Gennep, Tabou et Totemisme à Madagascar, ch. iii.

1095 See references above, p. 128, n. 1. Cf. Nor. Tr., pp. 323, 324; Nat. Tr., p. 168; Taplin, The Narrinyeri, p. 16; Roth, North Queensland Ethnography. Bull. 10, Records of Austral. Museum, VII, p. 76.

1096 It is to be remembered that when it is a religious interdict that has been violated, these sanctions are not the only ones; there is also a real punishment or a stigma of opinion.

1097 See Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 67-68. We say nothing of the recent, and slightly explicit, theory of Crawley (Mystic Rose, ch. iv-vii), according to which the contagiousness of taboos is due to a false interpretation of the phenomena of contagion. It is arbitrary. As Jevons very truly says in the passage to which we refer, the contagious character of sacredness is affirmed a priori, and not on a faith in badly interpreted experiences.

1098 See above, p. 229.

1099 See above, p. 194.

1100 See above, p. 190.

1101 This has been well demonstrated by Preuss in his articles in the Globus.

1102 It is true that this contagiousness is not peculiar to religious forces; those belonging to magic have the same property; yet it is evident that they do not correspond to objectified social sentiments. It is because magic forces have been conceived on the model of religious forces. We shall come back to this point again (see p. 361).

1103 See above, p. 235.

1104 Strehlow, I, p. 4.

1105 Of course the word designating these celebrations changes with the tribes. The Urabunna call them Pitjinta (Nor. Tr., p. 284); the Warramunga Thalaminta (ibid., p. 297), etc.

1106 Schulze, loc. cit., p. 243; Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 169 f.

1107 Nat. Tr., pp. 170 ff.

1108 Of course the women are under the same obligation.

1109 The apmara is the only thing which he brought from the camp.

1110 Nat. Tr., pp. 185-186.

1111 Nor. Tr., p. 288.

1112 Ibid.

1113 Nor. Tr., p. 312.

1114 Ibid.

1115 We shall see below that these clans are much more numerous than Spencer and Gillen say.

1116 Nat. Tr., pp. 184-185.

1117 Nat. Tr., pp. 438, 461, 464; Nor. Tr., pp. 596 ff.

1118 Nat. Tr., p. 201.

1119 Ibid., p. 206. We use the words of Spencer and Gillen, and with them, we say that “spirits or spirit parts of kangaroo” are disengaged from the rocks. Strehlow (III, p. 7) contests the exactness of this expression. According to him, the rite makes real kangaroos, with living bodies, appear. But this dispute is without interest, just as the one about the notion of the ratapa was (see above, p. 252). The kangaroo germs thus escaping from the rock are not visible, so they are not made out of the same substance as the kangaroos which we see. This is all that Spencer and Gillen mean to say. It is quite certain, moreover, that they are not pure spirits such as a Christian might conceive. Like human souls, they have a material form.

1120 Nat. Tr., p. 181.

1121 A tribe on the east of Lake Eyre.

1122 Nor. Tr., pp. 287 f.

1123 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 798. Cf. Howitt, Legends of the Dieri and Kindred Tribes of Central Australia, in J.A.I., XXIV, pp. 124 ff. Howitt believes that the ceremony is performed by the men of the totem, but is not prepared to say so definitely.

1124 Nor. Tr., p. 295.

1125 Ibid., p. 314.

1126 Ibid., pp. 296 f.

1127 Nat. Tr., p. 170.

1128 Ibid., p. 519.—The analysis of the rites which have just been studied is based solely on the observations of Spencer and Gillen. Since this chapter was written, Strehlow has published the third fascicule of his work, which deals with the positive cult and especially the Intichiuma, or, as he says, the rites of the mbatjalkatiuma. But we have found nothing in this publication which obliges us to modify the preceding description or even to complete it with important additions. The most interesting thing taught by Strehlow on this subject is that the effusions and oblations of blood are much more frequent than one would suspect from the account of Spencer and Gillen (see Strehlow, III, pp. 13, 14, 19, 29, 39, 43, 46, 56, 67, 80, 89).

Moreover, the information given by Strehlow in regard to the cult must be taken carefully, for he was not a witness of the rites he describes; he confined himself to collecting oral testimony, which is generally rather summary (see fasc. III, Preface of Leonhardi, p. v). It may even be asked if he has not confused the totemic ceremonies of initiation with those which he calls mbatjalkatiuma, to an excessive degree. Of course, he has made a praiseworthy attempt to distinguish them and has made two of their distinctive characteristics very evident. In the first place, the Intichiuma always takes place at a sacred spot to which the souvenir of some ancestor is attached, while the initiation ceremonies may be celebrated anywhere. Secondly, the oblations of blood are special to the Intichiuma, which proves that they are close to the heart of the ritual (III, p. 7). But in the description which he gives us of the rites, we find facts belonging indifferently to each species of ceremony. In fact, in what he describes under the name mbatjalkatiuma, the young men generally take an important part (for example, see pp. 11, 13, etc.), which is characteristic of the initiation. Also, it seems as though the place of the rite is arbitrary, for the actors construct their scene artificially. They dig a hole into which they go; he seldom makes any allusion to sacred trees or rocks and their ritual rôle.

1129 Nat. Tr., p. 203. Cf. Meyer, The Encounter Bay Tribe, in Woods, p. 187.

1130 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 204.

1131 Nat. Tr., pp. 205-207.

1132 Nor. Tr., pp. 286 f.

1133 Ibid., p. 294.

1134 Ibid., p. 296.

1135 Meyer, in Woods, p. 187.

1136 We have already cited one case; others will be found in Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 208; Nor. Tr., p. 286.

1137 The Walpari, Wulmala, Tjingilli, Umbaia.

1138 Nor. Tr., p. 318.

1139 For the second part of the ceremony as for the first, we have followed Spencer and Gillen. On this subject, the recent fascicule of Strehlow only confirms the observations of his predecessors, at least on all essential points. He recognizes that after the first ceremony (two months afterwards, he says, p. 13), the chief of the clan eats the totemic animal or plant ritually and that after this he raises the interdicts; he calls this operation die Freigabe des Totems zum allgemeinen Gebrauch (III, p. 7). He even tells us that this operation is important enough to have a special word for it in the Arunta language. He adds, it is true, that this ritual consummation is not the only one, but that the chiefs and old men sometimes eat the sacred plant or animal before the first ceremony and that the performer of the rite does so after the celebration. The fact is not improbable; these consummations are means employed by the officiants or assistants to acquire virtues which they acquire; it is not surprising if they are numerous. It does not invalidate the account of Spencer and Gillen at all, for the rite upon which they insist, and not without reason, is the Freigabe des Totems.

On only two points does Strehlow contest the allegations of Spencer and Gillen. In the first place, he declares that the ritual consumption does not take place in every case. This cannot be doubted, for there are some animals and plants which are not edible. But still, the rite is very frequent; Strehlow himself cites numerous examples (pp. 13, 14, 19, 23, 33, 36, 50, 59, 67, 68, 71, 75, 80, 84, 89, 93). Secondly, we have seen that according to Spencer and Gillen, if the chief does not eat the totemic animal or plant, he will lose his powers. Strehlow assures us that the testimony of natives does not confirm this assertion. But this question seems to us to be quite secondary. The assured fact is that the ritual consumption is required, so it must be thought useful or necessary. Now, like every communion, it can only serve to confer needed virtues upon the person communicating. It does not follow from the fact that the natives, or some of them, have forgotten this function of the rite, that it is not real. Is it necessary to repeat that worshippers are generally ignorant of the real reasons for their practices?

1140 See The Religion of the Semites, Lectures vi-xi, and the article Sacrifice in the Encyclopædia Britannica (Ninth Edition).

1141 See Hubert and Mauss, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, in Mélanges d’histoire des religions, pp. 40 ff.

1142 See the explanation of this rule, above, p. 229.

1143 See Strehlow, III, p. 3.

1144 We must not forget that among the Arunta it is not completely forbidden to eat the totemic animal.

1145 See other facts in Frazer, Golden Bough, pp. 348 ff.

1146 The Religion of the Semites, pp. 275 ff.

1147 The Religion of the Semites, pp. 318-319.

1148 On this point, see Hubert and Mauss, Mélanges d’histoire des religions, preface, p. v ff.

1149 The Religion of the Semites, pp. 390 ff.

1150 Smith cites some cases himself in The Rel. of the Semites, p. 231.

1151 For example, see Exodus xxix. 10-14; Leviticus ix. 8-11; it is their own blood which the priests of Baal pour over the altar (1 Kings xviii. 28).

1152 Strehlow, III, p. 12, verse 7.

1153 At least when it is complete: in certain cases, it may be reduced to one of its elements.

1154 Strehlow says that the natives “regard these ceremonies as a sort of divine service, just as a Christian regards the exercises of his religion” (III, p. 9).

1155 It should be asked, for example, whether the effusions of blood and the offerings of hair which Smith regards as acts of communion are not real oblations (see Smith, op. cit., pp. 320 ff.).

1156 The expiatory rites, of which we shall speak more fully in the fifth chapter of this same book, are almost exclusively oblations. They are communions only secondarily.

1157 This is why we frequently speak of the ceremonies as if they were addressed to living personalities (see, for example, texts by Krichauff and Kemp, in Eylmann, p. 202).

1158 In a philosophical sense, the same is true of everything, for nothing exists except in representation. But as we have shown (p. 227), this proposition is doubly true for religious forces, for there is nothing in the constitution of things which corresponds to sacredness.

1159 See Mauss, Essai sur les variations saisonnières des sociétés Eskimos, in Année Sociol., IX, pp. 96 ff.

1160 Nat. Tr., p. 176.

1161 Nor. Tr., p. 179. It is true that Spencer and Gillen do not say expressly that this is an Intichiuma. But the context allow of no doubt on this point.

1162 In the index of totem names, Spencer and Gillen write Untjalka (Nor. Tr., p. 772).

1163 Nat. Tr., p. 182.

1164 Nat. Tr., p. 193.

1165 Schulze, loc. cit., p. 221; cf. p. 243.

1166 Strehlow, III, pp. 11, 31, 36, 37, 68, 72, 84.

1167 Ibid., p. 100.

1168 Ibid., pp. 81, 100, 112, 115.

1169 Nor. Tr., p. 310.

1170 Nor. Tr., pp. 285-286. Perhaps the object of these movements of the lance is to pierce the clouds.

1171 Nor. Tr., pp. 294-296. It is curious that, on the contrary, the Anula regard the rainbow as productive of rain (ibid., p. 314).

1172 The same process is employed among the Arunta (Strehlow, III, p. 132). Of course we may ask if this effusion of blood is not an oblation designed to win the powers which produce rain. However, Gason says distinctly that this is a way of imitating the water which falls.

1173 Gason, The Dieri Tribe, in Curr, II, pp. 66-68. Howitt (Nat. Tr., pp. 798-800) mentions other rites of the Dieri for obtaining rain.

1174 Ethnological Notes on the Western Australian Aborigines, in Internationales Archiv. f. Ethnographie, XVI, pp. 6-7. Cf. Withnal, Marriage Rites and Relationship in Man, 1903, p. 42.

1175 We presume that sub-totems may have tarlow, for, according to Clement, certain clans have several totems.

1176 Clement says a tribal family.

1177 We shall explain below (p. 362) why this is incorrect.

1178 On this classification, see Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, pp. 37 ff.; Hubert and Mauss, Théorie générale de la Magie, pp. 61 ff.

1179 We say nothing of what has been called the law of opposition, for, as MM. Hubert and Mauss have shown, a contrary produces its opposite only through the intermediacy of a similar (Théorie générale de la Magie, p. 70).

1180 Lectures on the History of Kingship, p. 39.

1181 It is applicable in the sense that there is really an association of the statue and the person encharmed. But it is true that this association is the simple product of an association of ideas by similarity. The true determining cause of the phenomenon is the contagiousness peculiar to religious forces, as we have shown.

1182 For the causes determining this outward manifestation, see above, pp. 230 ff.

1183 M. Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, pp. 61-68.

1184 Golden Bough², I, pp. 69-75.

1185 We do not wish to say that there was ever a time when religion existed without magic. Probably as religion took form, certain of its principles were extended to non-religious relations, and it was thus supplemented by a more or less developed magic. But if these two systems of ideas and practices do not correspond to distinct historical phases, they have a relation of definite derivation between them. This is all we have sought to establish.

1186 Loc. cit., pp. 108 ff.

1187 See above, pp. 203 f.

1188 Of course animal societies do exist. However, the word does not have exactly the same sense when applied to men and to animals. The institution is a characteristic fact of human societies; but animals have no institutions.

1189 The conception of cause is not the same for a scholar and for a man with no scientific culture. Also, many of our contemporaries understand the principle of causality differently, as they apply it to social facts and to physico-chemical facts. In the social order, men frequently exhibit a conception of causality singularly like that which was at the basis of magic for a long time. One might even ask if a physicist and a biologist represent the causal relation in the same fashion.

1190 Of course these ceremonies are not followed by an alimentary communion. According to Strehlow, they have another name, at least when they concern non-edible plants: they are called, not mbatjalkatiuma, but knujilelama (Strehlow, III, p. 96).

1191 Strehlow, III, p. 8.

1192 The Warramunga are not the only ones among whom the Intichiuma takes the form of a dramatic representation. It is also found among the Tjingilli, the Umbaia, the Wulmala, the Walpari and even the Kaitish, though in certain of its features the ritual of these latter resembles that of the Arunta (Nor. Tr., p. 291, 309, 311, 317). If we take the Warramunga as a type, it is because they have been studied the best by Spencer and Gillen.

1193 This is the case with the Intichiuma of the black cockatoo (see above, p. 353).

1194 Nor. Tr., pp. 300 ff.

1195 One of these two actors does not belong to the Black Snake clan, but to that of the Crow. This is because the Crow is supposed to be an “associate” of the Black Snake: in other words, it is a sub-totem.

1196 Nor. Tr., p. 302.

1197 Ibid., p. 305.

1198 See Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 188; Strehlow, III, p. 5.

1199 Strehlow himself recognizes this: “The totemic ancestor and his descendant, who represents him (der Darsteller) are presented as one in these sacred hymns.” (III, p. 6). As this incontestable fact contradicts the theory according to which ancestral souls do not reincarnate themselves, Strehlow adds, it is true, in a note, that “in the course of the ceremony there is no real incarnation of the ancestor in the person who represents him.” If Strehlow wishes to say that the incarnation does not take place on the occasion of the ceremony, then nothing is more certain. But if he means that there is no incarnation at all, we do not understand how the officiant and the ancestor can be confounded.

1200 Perhaps this difference is partially due to the fact that among the Warramunga each clan is thought to be descended from one single ancestor about whom the legendary history of the clan centres. This is the ancestor whom the rite commemorates; now the officiant need not be descended from him. One might even ask if these mythical chiefs, who are sorts of demigods, are submitted to reincarnation.

1201 In this Intichiuma, three assistants represent ancestors “of a considerable antiquity”; they play a real part (Nat. Tr., pp. 181-182). It is true that Spencer and Gillen add that these are ancestors posterior to the Alcheringa. Nevertheless, mythical personages are represented in the course of the rite.

1202 Sacred rocks and water-holes are not mentioned. The centre of the ceremony is the image of an emu drawn on the ground, which can be made anywhere.

1203 We do not mean to say that all the ceremonies of the Warramunga are of this type. The example of the white cockatoo, of which we spoke above, proves that there are exceptions.

1204 Nor. Tr., pp. 226 ff. On this same subject, cf. certain passages of Eylmann which evidently refer to the same mythical being (Die Eingeborenen, etc., p. 185). Strehlow also mentions a mythical snake among the Arunta (Kulaia, water-snake) which may not differ greatly from the Wollunqua (Strehlow, I, p. 78; cf. II, p. 71, where the Kulaia is found in a list of totems).

1205 We use the Arunta words, in order not to complicate our terminology; the Warramunga call this mythical period Wingara.

1206 “It is not easy to express in words what is in reality rather a vague feeling amongst the natives, but after carefully watching the different series of ceremonies, we were impressed with the feeling that the Wollunqua represented to the native mind the idea of a dominant totem” (Nor. Tr., p. 248).

1207 One of the most solemn of these ceremonies is the one which we have had occasion to describe above (p. 217), in the course of which an image of the Wollunqua is designed on a sort of hillock which is then torn to pieces in the midst of a general effervescence.

1208 Nor. Tr., pp. 227, 248.

1209 Here are the terms of Spencer and Gillen in the only passage in which they speak of a possible connection between the Wollunqua and rain. A few days after the rite about the hillock, “the old men say that they have heard Wollunqua speak, that he was satisfied with what had passed and that he was going to send rain. The reason for this prophecy was that they, as well as ourselves, had heard thunder rolling at a distance.” To such a slight extent is the production of rain the immediate object of the ceremony that they did not attribute it to Wollunqua until several days later, and then after accidental circumstances. Another fact shows how vague the ideas of the natives are on this point. A few lines below, thunder is spoken of as a sign, not of the Wollunqua’s satisfaction, but of its discontent. In spite of these prognostics, continue our authors, “the rain did not fall. But some days later, they heard the thunder rolling in the distance again. The old men said that the Wollunqua was grumbling because he was not contented” with the way in which the rite had been celebrated. Thus a single phenomenon, the noise of thunder, is sometimes interpreted as a sign of a favouring disposition, and sometimes as a mark of evil intentions.

However, there is one detail of the ritual which, if we accept the explanation of it proposed by Spencer and Gillen, is directly efficient. According to them, the destruction of the hillock was intended to frighten the Wollunqua and to prevent it, by magic constraint, from leaving its retreat. But this interpretation seems very doubtful to us. In fact, in the very case of which we were speaking, where it was announced that the Wollunqua was dissatisfied, this dissatisfaction was attributed to the fact that they had neglected to take away the debris of the hillock. So this removal is demanded by the Wollunqua itself, and in no way intended to intimidate it and exercise a coercive influence over it. This is probably merely one case of a more general rule which is in force among the Warramunga: the instruments of the cult must be destroyed after each ceremony. Thus the ritual ornamentations with which the officiants are decorated are violently torn off from them when the rite is terminated (Nor. Tr., p. 205).

1210 Nor. Tr., pp. 207-208.

1211 Ibid., p. 210.

1212 See, in the list of totems drawn up by Strehlow, Nos. 432-442 (II, p. 72).

1213 See Strehlow, III, p, 8. Among the Arunta there is also a totem Worra which greatly resembles the “laughing boy” totem of Warramunga (ibid., and III, p. 124). Worra means young men. The object of the ceremony is to make the young men take more pleasure in the game labara (for this game, see Strehlow, I, p. 55, n. 1).

1214 See above, p. 373.

1215 A case of this sort will be found in Nor. Tr., p. 204.

1216 Nat. Tr., p. 118 and n. 2, pp. 618 ff.; Nor. Tr., pp. 716 ff. There are some sacred ceremonies from which women are not wholly excluded (see, for example, Nor. Tr., pp. 375 ff.); but this is exceptional.

1217 See Nat. Tr., pp. 329 ff.; Nor. Tr., pp. 210 ff.

1218 This is the case, for example, with the corrobbori of the Molonga among the Pitta-Pitta of Queensland and the neighbouring tribes (see Roth, Ethnog. Studies among the N.W. Central Queensland Aborigines, pp. 120 ff.).—References for the ordinary corrobbori will be found in Stirling, Rep. of the Horn Expedition to Central Australia, Part IV, p. 72, and in Roth, op. cit., pp. 117 ff.

1219 On this question see the excellent work of Culin, Games of the North American Indians (XXIVth Rep. of the Bureau of Am. Ethnol.).

1220 See above, p. 81.

1221 Especially in sexual matters. In the ordinary corrobbori, sexual licence is frequent (see Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., pp. 96-97, and Nor. Tr., pp. 136-137). On sexual licence in popular feasts in general, see Hagelstrange, Süddeutsches Bauernleben im Mittelalter, pp. 221 ff.

1222 Thus the exogamic rules must be violated in the course of certain religious ceremonies (see above, p. 216, n. 1). A precise ritual meaning probably could not be found for these excesses. It is merely a mechanical consequence of the state of super-excitation provoked by the ceremony. It is an example of rites having no definite object themselves, but which are mere discharges of energy (see above, p. 381). The native does not assign them a definite end either; he merely says that if these licences are not committed, the rite will not produce its effects; the ceremony will fail.

1223 Here are the very words used by Spencer and Gillen: “They (the ceremonies connected with the totems) are often, though by no means always, associated with the performance of the ceremonies attendant upon initiation of young men, or are connected with the Intichiuma” (Nor. Tr., p. 178).

1224 We leave aside the question of what this character consists in. It is a problem which would lead us into a very long and technical development and which must therefore be treated by itself. Moreover, it does not concern the propositions established in this present work.

1225 This is chapter vi, entitled Ceremonies Connected with the Totems.

1226 Strehlow, III, pp. 1-2.

1227 This explains the error of which Strehlow accuses Spencer and Gillen: that they applied to one form of the ceremony the term which is more appropriate for the other. But in these conditions, the error hardly seems to have the gravity attributed to it by Strehlow.

1228 It cannot be otherwise. In fact, as the initiation is a tribal feast, novices of different totems are initiated at the same time. So the ceremonies which thus succeed one another in the same place have to do with several totems, and, therefore, they must take place away from the places with which they are connected by the myth.

1229 It will now be understood why we have never studied the initiation rites by themselves: it is because they are not a ritual entity, but are formed by the conglomeration of rites of different sorts. There are interdictions, ascetic rites and representative ceremonies which cannot be distinguished from those celebrated at the time of the Intichiuma. So we had to dismember this composite system and treat each of the different rites composing it separately, classifying them with the similar rites to which they are to be related. We have also seen (pp. 285 ff.) that the initiation has served as the point of departure for a new religion which tends to surpass totemism. But it has been sufficient for us to show that totemism contained the germs of this religion; we have had no need of following out its development. The object of this book is to study the elementary beliefs and practices; so we must stop at the moment when they give birth to more complex forms.

1230 Nat. Tr., p. 463. If the individual may choose between the ceremonies of his paternal and maternal totems, it is because, owing to reasons which we have set forth above (p. 183), he participates in both.

1231 See below, ch. v, p. 395.

1232 See Essai sur le Sacrifice, in Mélanges d’histoire des Religions, p. 83.

1233 Piacularia auspicia appellabant quæ sacrificantibus tristia portendebant (Paul ex Fest., p. 244, ed. Müller). The word piaculum is even used as a synonym of misfortune. “Vetonica herba,” says Pliny, “tantum gloriæ habet ut domus in qua sita sit tuta existimetur a piaculis omnibus” (XXV, 8, 46).

1234 Nor. Tr., p. 526; Eylmann, p. 239. Cf. above, p. 305.

1235 Brough Smyth, I, p. 106; Dawson, p. 64; Eylmann, p. 239.

1236 Dawson, p. 66; Eylmann, p. 241.

1237 Nat. Tr., p. 502; Dawson, p. 67.

1238 Nor. Tr., pp. 516-517.

1239 Ibid., pp. 520-521. The authors do not say whether these were tribal or blood relatives. The former hypothesis is the more probable one.

1240 Nor. Tr., pp. 525 f. This interdiction against speaking, which is peculiar to women, though it consists in a simple abstention, has all the appearance of a piacular rite: it is a way of incommoding one’s self. Therefore we mention it here. Also, fasting may be a piacular rite or an ascetic one, according to the circumstances. Everything depends upon the conditions in which it takes place and the end pursued (for the difference between these two sorts of rites, see below, p. 396).

1241 A very expressive illustration showing this rite will be found in Nor. Tr., p. 525.

1242 Ibid., p. 522.

1243 For the principal forms of funeral rites, see Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 446-508, for the tribes of the South-East; Spencer and Gillen, Nor. Tr., p. 505, and Nat. Tr., pp. 497 ff., for those of the centre; Roth, Nor. Queensland Ethnog., Bull. 9, in Records of the Australian Museum, VI, No. 5, pp. 365 ff. (Burial Customs and Disposal of the Dead).

1244 See, for example, Roth, loc. cit., p. 368; Eyre, Journals of Exped. into Central Aust., II, pp. 344 f.

1245 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 500; Nor. Tr., pp. 507, 508; Eylmann, p. 241; Parker, Euahlayi, pp. 83 ff.; Brough Smyth, I, p. 118.

1246 Dawson, p. 66; Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 466; Eylmann, pp. 239-240.

1247 Brough Smyth, I, p. 113.

1248 W. E. Stanbridge, Trans. Ethnological Society of London, N.S., Vol. I, p. 286.

1249 Brough Smyth, I, p. 104.

1250 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 459. Similar scenes will be found in Eyre, op. cit., II, p. 255, n., and p. 347; Roth, loc. cit., pp. 394, 395, for example; Grey, II, pp. 320 ff.

1251 Brough Smyth, I, pp. 104, 112; Roth, loc. cit., p. 382.

1252 Nor. Tr., pp. 511-512.

1253 Dawson, p. 67; Roth, loc. cit., pp. 366-367.

1254 Nat. Tr., pp. 508-510.

1255 A little wooden vessel, of which we spoke above, p. 334.

1256 Nat. Tr., pp. 508-510. The other final rite at which Spencer and Gillen assisted is described on pp. 503-508 of the same work. It does not differ essentially from the one we have analysed.

1257 Nor. Tr., pp. 531-540.

1258 Contrarily to what Jevons says, Introduction to the History of Religion, pp. 46 ff.

1259 This makes Dawson say that the mourning is sincere (p. 66). But Eylmann assures us that he never knew a single case where there was a wound from sorrow really felt (op. cit., p. 113).

1260 Nat. Tr., p. 510.

1261 Eylmann, pp. 238-239.

1262 Nor. Tr., p. 507; Nat. Tr., p. 498.

1263 Nat. Tr., p. 500; Eylmann, p. 227.

1264 Brough Smyth, I, p. 114.

1265 Nat. Tr., p. 510.

1266 Several examples of this belief are to be found in Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 435. Cf. Strehlow, I, 15-16; II, p. 7.

1267 It may be asked why repeated ceremonies are necessary to produce the relief which follows upon mourning. The funeral ceremonies are frequently very long; they include many operations which take place at intervals during many months. Thus they prolong and support the moral disturbance brought about by the death (cf. Hertz, La Representation collective de la mort, in Année Sociol., X, pp. 48 ff.). In a general way, a death marks a grave change of condition which has extended and enduring effects upon the group. It takes a long time to neutralize these effects.

1268 In a case reported by Grey from the observations of Bussel, the rite has all the aspects of a sacrifice: the blood is sprinkled over the body itself (Grey, II, p. 330). In other cases, there is something like an offering of the beard: men in mourning cut off a part of their beards, which they throw on to the corpse (ibid., p. 335).

1269 Nat. Tr., pp. 135-136.

1270 Of course each churinga is believed to be connected with an ancestor. But it is not to appease the spirits of the ancestors that they mourn for the lost churinga. We have shown elsewhere (p. 123) that the idea of the ancestor only entered into the conception of the churinga secondarily and late.

1271 Op. cit., p. 207; cf. p. 116.

1272 Eylmann, p. 208.

1273 Ibid., p. 211.

1274 Howitt, The Dieri, in J.A.I., XX (1891), p. 93.

1275 Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 394.

1276 Howitt, ibid., p. 396.

1277 Communication of Gason in J.A.I., XXIV (1895), p. 175.

1278 Nor. Tr., p. 286.

1279 Gason, The Dieri Tribe, in Curr, II, p. 68.

1280 Gason, The Dieri Tribe: Eylmann, p. 208.

1281 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 277 and 430.

1282 Ibid., p. 195.

1283 Gason, The Dieri Tribe, in Curr, II, p. 69. The same process is used to expiate a ridiculous act. Whenever anybody, by his awkwardness or otherwise, has caused the laughter of others, he asks one of them to beat him on the head until blood flows. Then things are all right again, and the one who was laughed at joins in the general gaiety (ibid., p. 70).

1284 Eylmann, pp. 212 and 447.

1285 See above, p. 385.

1286 The Religion of the Semites, lect. XI.

1287 This is the case in which the Dieri, according to Jason, invoke the Mura-mura of water during a drought.

1288 Op. cit., p. 262.

1289 It is also possible that the belief in the morally tempering virtues of suffering (see above, p. 312) has added something here. Since sorrow sanctifies and raises the religious level of the worshipper, it may also raise him up again when he falls lower than usual.

1290 Cf. what we have said of expiation in our Division du travail social³, pp. 64 ff.

1291 See above, p. 301.

1292 Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 460; Nor. Tr., p. 601; Roth, North Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin No. 5, p. 24. It is useless to multiply references for so well-known a fact.

1293 However, Spencer and Gillen cite one case where churinga are placed on the head of the dead man (Nat. Tr., p. 156). But they admit that the fact is unique and abnormal (ibid., p. 157), while Strehlow energetically denies it (II, p. 79).

1294 Smith, Rel. of Semites, p. 153; cf. p. 446, the additional note, Holiness, Uncleanness and Taboo.

1295 Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 448-450; Brough Smyth, I, pp. 118, 120; Dawson, p. 67; Eyre, II, p. 251; Roth, North Queensland Ethn., Bull. Mo. 9, in Rec. of the Austral. Museum, VI, No. 5, p. 367.

1296 See above, p. 320.

1297 Nor. Tr., p. 599; Nat. Tr., p. 464.

1298 Among the Hebrews, for example, they sprinkled the altar with the blood of the expiatory victim (Lev. iv, 5 ff.); they burned the flesh and used products of this combustion to make water of purification (Numb. xix).

1299 Taplin, The Narrinyeri, pp. 32-34. When two persons who have thus exchanged their umbilical cords belong to different tribes, they are used as inter-tribal messengers. In this case, the exchange of cords took place shortly after birth, through the intermediary of their respective parents.

1300 It is true that Smith did not admit the reality of these substitutions and transformations. According to him, if the expiatory victim served to purify, it was because it had nothing impure in itself. At first, it was a holy thing; it was destined to re-establish, by means of a communion, the bonds of kinship uniting the worshipper to his god, when a ritual fault had strained or broken them. An exceptionally holy animal was chosen for this operation in order that the communion might be as efficacious as possible, and efface the effects of the fault as completely as possible. It was only when they no longer understood the meaning of the rite that the sacrosanct animal was considered impure (op. cit., pp. 347 ff.). But it is inadmissible that beliefs and practices as universal as these, which we find at the foundation of the expiatory sacrifice, should be the product of a mere error of interpretation. In fact, we cannot doubt that the expiatory victim was charged with the impurity of the sin. We have shown, moreover, that these transformations of the pure into the impure, or the contrary, are to be found in the most inferior societies which we know.

1301 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

1302 Quoted by James, op. cit., p. 20.

1303 See above, pp. 230 ff.

1304 Only one form of social activity has not yet been expressly attached to religion: that is economic activity. Sometimes processes that are derived from magic have, by that fact alone, an origin that is indirectly religious. Also, economic value is a sort of power or efficacy, and we know the religious origins of the idea of power. Also, richness can confer mana; therefore it has it. Hence it is seen that the ideas of economic value and of religious value are not without connection. But the question of the nature of these connections has not yet been studied.

1305 It is for this reason that Frazer and even Preuss set impersonal religious forces outside of, or at least on the threshold of religion, to attach them to magic.

1306 Boutroux, Science et Religion, pp. 206-207.

1307 See above, pp. 379 ff. On this same question, see also our article, “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives,” in the Revue de Métaphysique, May, 1898.

1308 William James, Principles of Psychology, I, p. 464.

1309 This universality of the concept should not be confused with its generality: they are very different things. What we mean by universality is the property which the concept has of being communicable to a number of minds, and in principle, to all minds; but this communicability is wholly independent of the degree of its extension. A concept which is applied to only one object, and whose extension is consequently at the minimum, can be the same for everybody: such is the case with the concept of a deity.

1310 It may be objected that frequently, as the mere effect of repetition, ways of thinking and acting become fixed and crystallized in the individual, in the form of habits which resist change. But a habit is only a tendency to repeat an act or idea automatically every time that the same circumstances appear; it does not at all imply that the idea or act is in the form of an exemplary type, proposed to or imposed upon the mind or will. It is only when a type of this sort is set up, that is to say, when a rule or standard is established, that social action can and should be presumed.

1311 Thus we see how far it is from being true that a conception lacks objective value merely because it has a social origin.

1312 See also above, p. 208.

1313 Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, pp. 131-138.

1314 Ibid., p. 446.

1315 See above, p. 18.

1316 William James, Principles of Psychology, I, p. 134.

1317 Men frequently speak of space and time as if they were only concrete extent and duration, such as the individual consciousness can feel, but enfeebled by abstraction. In reality, they are representations of a wholly different sort, made out of other elements, according to a different plan, and with equally different ends in view.

1318 At bottom, the concept of totality, that of society and that of divinity are very probably only different aspects of the same notion.

1319 See our Classifications primitives, loc. cit., pp. 40 ff.